Desktop environment vs performance and audio -Now a hardware complaint thread-

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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So… System: 5950X + X570 TUF + RX 6700 non-XT, WD Black 1TB gen4 main system drive, 16x4 3200mhz RAM on currently XMP/auto timings. Yes, a little “weak” on GPU, but I suspect my general annoyance level would be unaffected by bigger better badder.

Trouble: Everything except Gnome + Wayland makes everything run a little bit like garbage. KDE anything gets plagued with audio cutouts over HDMI (not present with Gnome, less-bad but still present using X) and causes outright strange gaming performance. It’s absolutely wild to me that choice of DE has a greater impact on performance than the entire rest of the underlying OS, at least as “different” as Linux gets. The KDE regressions are especially annoying, as from a general desktop usability perspective it’s great… Then I open a game and get greeted with sticky, slow frames and jarring stutter that the application sometimes isn’t even aware of… Or opening a Youtube video and getting greeted with 3 seconds of sound followed by varying 0.2-3s cuts… But not every video, only some, with it usually being the lower quality ones getting hamstrung.

I want to understand the why/how as much as I want a fix. 18 years ago I was absolutely gutting Windows of any background process whatsoever in order to get to a passable gaming experience (and it was worth 100% gains over a “stock” 98 or XP install) but why does my choice of DE make it so that I can’t even run an audio player behind a game without noticeably losing performance? Is it the whole composition pipeline creating its own stack of potential issues?

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Welcome and sorry to hear of your issues.

When did this issues start? Right at the beginning of the build,have you checked latancymon, more details of things you have done will definitely help us out!

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What distro are you using?

Are the graphic drivers and firmwares loading as they should?
$ sudo dmesg | grep -i firmware

Also check if there’s something else broken like memory or a broken sata cable generating loads of errors.
$ sudo dmesg | grep -i error

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Ah. I didn’t include much as far as distro info because it seems to not matter whatsoever. Similar behavior has occurred under:
PopOS (wasn’t /awful/ about the audio part)
Manjaro (probably the worst for it so far but was also the one I used longest)
Fedora (was mostly OK under Gnome, very brief moments, KDE worked awful)
Nobara - Like Fedora but worse in all regards
Debian - Currently running. Gnome under X or Wayland is mostly fine, others are iffy. X lets me run things fullscreen without dumb issues, when under Wayland anything fullscreen either refuses to go fullscreen or has an absolutely horrendous performance regression vs windowed fullscreen… But the desktop animations/resizing/etc breaks slightly less.

Drivers and firmware are generally functioning correctly. I’ve been known to try some “stupid” hardware and/or BIOS configs, but under the software configs where stuff goes to hell it seems to not matter in the slightest.

Edit: Haahahahahahahahahahaha. The clipping at present /seems/ to delete itself on dropping back to Gen 3 PCIe speed, which the 6700 is /fine/ with since it, you know, actually uses 16 lanes. Then again, it initially seemed to be noticeably better, albeit not quite perfect with Debian, until like hour 15 of the install existing, at which point it fell apart in spectacular fashion.

Edit 2: Thaaaaaaaat’s a lie. It’s /better/ at Gen 3, but still intermittently drops audio for no particular reason. No dmesg errors to report, only non-loading driver/firmware is one that apparently doesn’t actually exist related to WiFi.

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That’s weird, I’d expect the reverse, gnome can be a resource hog when I use extensions to make look similar to win 7. Since then I’ve switched to Cinnamon

I also get intermittent stutters on my desktop on youtube, but not on my laptop.

Did you check for the youtube stuttering issues if you are missing any video codecs?
For example

On my laptop, I switched my nvidia proprietary graphics driver (from akmod to something else) and the performance issues in Firefox went away

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So, this turned into a witch hunt from my end.

De Le Ted’d the Debian install I was running in trade for Fedora, and it was fine… Until I brought it up to date vs what’s on the currently available Fedora 39 install media image. Then HDMI audio started clipping again.

Things that have helped noticeably: Clocking RAM/IF up to “this is probably stupid” (3800/1900) definitely reduced the frequency of audio drops. Using LACT to bump minimum GPU clock may or may not be helpful, but the slight bump in power limit is definitely a performance improvement so I’ll take it. Between this and a clean Fedora install, I got to a point of everything pretty much working.

Then I installed KDE via CLI as outlined here. Gave it another shot, yaknow. Learned of the ability to forceblock compositing, and it did seem to help get closer to my Gnome results than /not/ doing so (beam.NG in particular suffers from an oscillation in game speed that’s absolutely sickening under both KDE and Cinammon from what I’ve tried), but it was still iffy. Switching to KDE + X helped there, but broke the absolute hell out of Cyberpunk 2077, where loading a save would drag it to single-digit framerates until tabbing out and back in. Oh, and the audio ghosts returned. So I switched back to Gnome, scaling broke until I rebooted, and post-reboot it generally acted far worse than prior to installing KDE.

So I did what any reasonable person would and blew it away again. Maybe now I start playing with Gnome extensions to see if I can hate it less without breaking it again. If it wasn’t for the performance gaps I’m seeing, I’d 100% be running Cinnamon or Plasma, but it’s way too stark of a divide to ignore.

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So, to update this… I wound up mostly landing on Fedora 40 Gnome, and it /was/ good. Been running my RAM at standard XMP primarily to eliminate it as a possible source of headache and to let me drop SoC voltage, which trims quite a lot of power usage during system uptime.

However, the audio problems have come back with a vengeance in Gnome, almost exactly when I’ve officially “moved in”, to the extent my computer has both (!!) side panels installed. The specific causes are still various and can depend on what’s going on system-wise, such as some games being absolutely terrifying for it or fine depending on the phase of the moon, others being terrible all the time, etc.

Here’s the weird bit; I installed Cosmic Epoch via the ryanabx COPR and it fixes audio completely. It breaks plenty of other items and is very obviously “not ready”, but it does point me toward a guilty party with regard to HDMI audio playback; the compositor. This would explain why some are better than others with regard to keeping the audio component alive, as it does seem like the cuts/pauses occur when an off-pace frame happens, but…

Well, I’m not really any closer to any form of a permanent solution. Cosmic at present does a fair amount of things well, but the transition to full-screen with most applications is varying amounts of broken, depending on the specific app. However, it works /great/ for the random YouTube videos that turn into clippy, stuttery messes for no good reason. I say random, but it seems to have something to do with quality levels and whatever back-end the YT player happens to go for, with it generally being worse on lower-quality, theoretically “lighter” videos, particularly if they happen to be somewhere around 24fps instead of 30 or 60.

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On my very limited use time so far on Linux I find it’s not nearly as good as a cleaned out windows for anything with sound unfortunately. For general usage it’s good however

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So, my most recent “update” so to speak resulted in filing an RMA with XFX for the 6700. I set up another system using similar-but-different hardware, a 3900X with a “fresh” AsRock B550 MB + cheap 16x2 RAM. I set it up with my old RX 580 and had zero issues in any regard, so I swapped them. The trouble followed the 6700, including a repeated fresh installation of Fedora on the now-3900X+6700-system, but my existing 5950X system fired up directly with no further issue with the 580.

We’ll see what happens. I’ve seen others complain in other forums with 6xxx AMD cards having similar issues (even under Windows), with their resolutions being “replace the card”, but it’s odd. It’s definitely a compatibility issue, as the same 6700 is flawless under Windows, but with it being a non-issue as wide-ranging as AMDxLinux seems to be for /most/, it may just be a specific-hardware issue in other regards. Failing resolution with RMA, I’ll throw Windows at the other platform and sell the 6700 instead of my 580… Which is unfortunate, as the 6700 fits all of my needs with regard to perfomance (it does 4K w/some amount of scaling relatively similarly to how a 580 does 1080 native) without being stupid expensive. A 77/78/79GRE is almost tempting, but running into the same problem would be massively more offensive at their price points.

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Got the 6700 back. It’s a new and different card.

Same shit. So we’re back to it being a problem somewhere in the driver stack, and I’m /still/ weirded out by how much of a difference different DEs seem to make. Will test it again in the 3900X system just to verify, but it’s looking like keeping it there and throwing Win11 at it to sell it is the best/most viable option since the previous 6700 was fine in Windows, just not Linux… But excepting this issue I greatly prefer my Linux experience.

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I admire your tenacity in trying to eke out this error. 20 years ago I might have done the same but these days I’m just glad my laptop works quite flawlessly (Dell Latitude 7490 with i7 and iGPU only, KDE Neon on X11, HDMI usually only when I plug it into the big TV, which works flawlessly with videos and streams; I have a USB-C/Thunderbolt dock with an ultra-wide monitor connected via DP).

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More “excitement” to report!

Threw Windows at the 3900X system. I had forgotten how much of a relatively painful experience that was, since the last time I fully committed to a fresh install was some 8 years ago. AMD’s driver installer hung for 10+ minutes on a black-but-detected-input screen, but a forced reset brought it back with everything installed and functioning. So I started poking around, and the ghost is still here! Probably wouldn’t bother most people terribly much at the relatively low incidence rate it seems to have settled into after some uptime, but ARGH.

Side note though; when I stated “it doesn’t happen under Windows”, the Windows install in question lives on a SATA SSD while all my Linux installs and /this/ Windows install are on an NVME. This is noteworthy only because it seems like it /may/ be disk-hit related. The AMD Software app seems to have some amount of involvement as well; I typed most of this with it closed to full background and got nary a stutter from a YouTube video in the background, but having it open quickly resulted in several incidents. I don’t know. I’d say I don’t /care/, but clearly I very, very much do.

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So I tried an Arc A770.

It was interesting. It performed very well in most scenarios. Path of Exile was a bit odd-man-out, it was generally capable of very similar visual settings to my 6700, but there was one set of effects that would reliably crash the game, and another effect that even with dynamic resolution scaling and settings that would spit out 150+fps without vsync otherwise it’d chug down to the high 30s reliably. Cyberpunk 2077 performed better than the very low bar set by my RX 580, but very considerably worse than the 6700. And it would crash quickly enough that it was impossible to progress whatsoever, but never as consistently as I found elsewhere. Death Stranding was an available freebie with the Arc purchase, so I took it. Very first “gameplay” cutscene (opening cutscene, then 35 seconds of gameplay, then another cutscene, that one) would video crash on the exact same frame every time. Sweet.

A long trek to Microcenter and some more money leaving my wallet later, I acquired a 7900 GRE from AsRock. It actually runs beamNG slightly /worse/ than the A770 did. Not by a particularly wide margin, the framerate in raw terms is almost identical, but the pacing on Arc was incredible for not being a locked 60 with as high as I had the settings swung. Cyberpunk results are fairly solid but not exactly lifechanging; with some FSR it’ll lock 60 comfortably at 3840x2160 + High settings (45-55 native). Noteworthy that the 6700 could do the same when dropped to Medium and my perception doesn’t really swing much between the two.

However… I have a feeling this too shall return. My 580 is still flawless on audio, Arc was also flawless… This 7900GRE is better than the 6700 so far and I’ve yet to have an audio dropout anywhere near as long-duration as was common to it (seconds vs tenths), but it pops where the 6700 might’ve dropped. I don’t want to live with that at this price point; if I was less dumb when I bought the 6700 I would’ve returned it.

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So, the 7900 went back pretty much the day after installation, because while my old 580 doesn’t really have the horsepower to land at the 4K display resolution I’ve been running in newish games, it at least runs everything and doesn’t have the audio bugs.

So I tried a 4060 as the cheapest way to see how nV’s behavior is under Linux. At first I thought I may have made mistakes regarding driver installation, or that it was still entirely preferable to use X11 with it. Troubleshot it a bit, absolved ourselves of any wrongdoing, and came to the conclusion that the 4060 is an absolute dumpster fire of a graphics card in several ways.

It’s better than the 580 by a reasonable margin in games, but not by the cost gap comparing my 2019 purchase price to today’s cost on a 4060. To be slightly more specific, it seems to spit out ~50% higher framerates at the same settings. The Navi audio bugs were also not present, though there was a vaguely repeatable “scream” on audio when the card clogged (mainly on loading screens, sometimes in-game coupled with a bad stutter). Now for the weirdness; swapping from gameplay to menu in games where pause/inventory/map/etc menus are a discrete separate screen hung pretty badly. Like, seconds. Similar would happen when resuming gameplay, with a few moments of <20fps before it figured itself out and came back to the 60ish I was targeting. And regardless of windowing system, Steam had issues, web browsing (especially scrolling) was perceptually laggy, it felt like I was on my first-and-last system to use an nVidia card. Considering that was a 5000+ BE with (originally) SLI 8800GTs that then soldiered on til 2016 with a HD 4650 then 5750 after the 8800GTs died by 2009, you may see why I was a little offended.

Do I suspect a 4070/4070S to be slightly better in those regards? Yes. Slightly. However, there are a few bugs that I recently (like, last night) noticed won’t be fixed by bigger badder nV hardware, such as the occasional Steam Has Turned Into Garbled Colors as seen in Wendell’s recent discussion about AM5 performance’s Linux section. So the bright side is I won’t be spending $600 on an nVidia really-should-be-the-4060 4070 Super.

And then there’s the warrantied 6700. After the 7900 GRE showed 100% of the troubles I experienced with the 6700s, I told XFX support about it, saying I didn’t think it was the specific 6700 at fault but rather a design issue. And made another case with AMD support explaining the whole lot for a second time, after the first pointed me to a Linux driver bug reporting page even though I’d explained that while it was Linux that first exhibited the issues, I was still having them in Windows as well.

XFX went “well maybe it’s a slot issue, have you contacted the motherboard manufacturer?”

AMD went “It sounds like you’re facing frustrating audio issues with both the 6700 and 7900 GRE GPUs, including HDMI audio dropouts and crackling sounds, despite extensive troubleshooting on your part.
If you still have the graphics card, I can help you troubleshoot the issue.”

Response to XFX: “On two different motherboards with different chipsets from different manufacturers with different CPUs, both of which work fine with other GPUs?”

Response to AMD: “I still have the 6700, but the 7900 GRE has been returned. If I can solve the issue on the 6000-series, I’d consider buying something from the 7000 series, but my RX 580 /not/ having a problem, and the Arc A770 I tried briefly also not having a problem makes me believe it’s something with the Navi 2x/3x cards. system info”

Radio silence from AMD, but XFX proceeded to open a second RMA and send me a prepaid shipping tag for the 6700. I have severe doubts as to this second RMA doing anything positive, because what are the chances I have found two defective 6700s and a defective 7900 GRE?

Only other thing I could believe, though it wouldn’t be a good solution (as it’d require putting things where I don’t want them and/or putting holes in things I don’t want holes in), is that the Navi 2x/3x HDMI implementation works fine on short cable runs, but is struggling with the +/-10’ cables that are 100% of what I own (some might be 3m rather than 10’). Once I get the return shipping tracking on 6700 #3 I’ll spend what I would’ve spent on shipping it out again on a 2m cable of the highest quality I can find (suggestions very welcome, it does appear that HDMI 2.1 may be limited to 2m/6’? It also shouldn’t matter since I’m only using HDMI 2.0/3840x2160) and see what happens.

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Received 6700 #3 today, and as mostly expected it still has trouble. It’s really not /that/ bad, it’s only occasional…

Just kidding it’s ****ing infuriating.

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Are these cutouts limited to HDMI? No issues with whatever on-board audio your motherboard has?

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HDMI and only HDMI and only with Navi cards (though to be fair I haven’t tried a Navi 1x, only the 6700s + a 7900 GRE).

It’s also mostly a Linux thing, though I could find some occasional drops under Windows as well with #2.

HOWEVER, I’ve heard tell there’s theoretically a fix for it in kernel 6.11. Something about one set of fixes conflicting with another, conveniently dating back to around when I first switched to Linux.

I’ve now confirmed it in 4 different motherboards of 2 different sockets with 3 different processors, while the cables in use don’t act up with 3 different RX 580s, Arc A770, or RTX 4060*.

*The 4060 did have an audio issue of its own, but it was constrained to when the card got overloaded bad enough to stop drawing frames, wherein it would continue playing whatever note it was when it froze until recovery.

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Are you driving an A/V receiver with this HDMI (i.e. is it a “dedicated” audio connection)? Or using a monitor’s built-in audio? Something else entirely?

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HDMI to a 43" Pioneer 4K60 TV, nothing else in the loop.

Oh, AM5’s onboard GPU was also unaffected, but it’s juuust slow enough to be noticeable in desktop usage so it’s out too. Oddly, Cosmic’s compositor seems to generally bypass the problem (going back to the DE thing), but at least with the last of the pre-alpha test versions it still broke too many other things too often to actually use. Still something to possibly keep an eye on.

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I have been having trouble with HDMI audio on my Kubuntu 24.04 system. I have not had any of the other problems, just with HDMI audio. I do have a set of individual powered speaker’s that I could connect to my motherboards audio.