Battlemage - experience on Linux?

Hardware Hub GPU
21

I have a B580 in my linux system right now and it’s been overwhelmingly buggier than same version of everything but with a Radeon 5700XT. I’m hopeful this will work out in the end. I’ll try and make sure the problems are reported where people can actually fix them. This is a ryzen 7900X system with linux 6.12.8 and Mesa 24.3.3.

  • I already got one kernel oops. Currently trying to get it reported but confused about how mailing lists work

  • Cyberpunk leaks memory until the system kills it or itself. I’m still looking into it

  • Cyberpunk artefacting as shown in Wendell’s video - tracked on the mesa side (mesa gitlab issue #12339) and affects not just fog but also glass and water surfaces. It affects Lunar Lake too so it’s been known for month, no clue if that’s going to get fixed in a short time frame at all

  • Maximized video in Discord shows frozen display output until I press Esc

  • Trackmania (2020) straight up won’t launch

  • Odd split-second freezes sometimes happen - I’m guessing that’s mesa being confused

For good news, there really was no driver faffing about to get where I am right now because the xe driver is built into the kernel. Also, after switching to the Intel Arc B580, my total system power draw went from 70W to 50W at idle and from 380W to 310W in game. Nice!

1 Like
22

out of curiosity, what distro are you using? I am still trying to get my hands on a arc b580, but they have proven to be elusive.

23

Thanks for sharing your experience! I’m also curious which distro you’re running. Over on the Ubuntu side, Intel and Canonical are collaborating on some enablement/integration with their OS through their “Intel Graphics Preview” - have you tried this already?

Curious if they have a more polished integration vs what you’d get by default on other distros, e.g. RT support.

1 Like
24

I’m running NixOS unstable (25.05 beta) which makes it quite simple to roll back when things go wrong, for example. But NixOS is not for the faint of heart so don’t go ahead just copying my homework.

Update, took me several hours, but I managed to track down the Cyberpunk memory leak down to something between raytracing pipeline initialization and shader compilation code specifically in the Intel side of the mesa graphics driver. I’ll report it to mesa tomorrow.

Tried Trackmania United Forever, runs perfectly. So does Elden Ring (1440p max settings), though enabling any level of raytracing in it turns FPS into “seconds per frame”, barely enough to get back to main menu with some patience. Briefly ran PowerWash Simulator, no problems there

1 Like
25

It still amazes me that us regular gamer plebs now have the empowerment to debug our own GPU drivers. Not that it really helps everyone, you need to know a thing or two about software, but for those of us where the Venn diagram of “I can program this” and “I like to game” overlaps, it is simply awesome! :slight_smile:

1 Like