Gpu and CPU not being fully utilzed while gaming?

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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1

hey everyone, i'm having another issue with my ubuntu 15.04 install. I recently upgraded my GPU to a 7870 from intel iGPU, and have the proprietary drivers installed. I have done a fresh install since running the iGPU, so there are no conflicting drivers, but while playing games, i have low framerate even though niether my CPU, nor my GPU is running at 100%. does anyone have a fix for this? i'm really getting sick of windows.

Intel Pentium G3258
4GB ddr3-1600
Radeon hd 7870 HGZ edition
MSI h81M-P33
Corsair CX430M.

2

What kind of drivers are you using, the open source ones or the proprietary ones?
Also in what games are you experiencing this? In all of them?

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proprietary. and yes, pretty much every game that is somewhat demanding.

4

Are you using the latest catalyst drivers? You could try using the Radeon open source drivers.

5

yes, i am using the latest ones from AMD's website. i believe they are 15.2? I don't really want to use the open source drivers because they make my GPU fans spin at 100% all the time, and my ears start to bleed.

6

Make sure you're not using any hardware acceleration for flash player or your web browser ... I've had issues with it locking my clock speeds at pre-defined levels and not letting them reach their performance clock.

The fix was disabling hardware accel in my browser, and flash settings. If both of those dont do the trick try the desktop hardware accel too and see if that fixes it.

EDIT: The same probably goes for whatever video player you use.

1 Like
7

how exactly would is disable hardware acceleration on the desktop? im running gnome as my DE.

also, i get the exact same fps in games whether i run them in a 720p window, or run them fullscreen.

I have also tried running unigen heaven, and my GPU utilization goes to 100%, and it performs about as expected.

8

Off the top of my head I thought there was settings somewhere to disable desktop composition in the window manager. It's been a good bit since I was digging around in Ubuntu to tell you where the settings are exactly.

9

mhh you can try playing around with the catalyst settings

10

tried it, and it didn't help :/

11

What games? CPU and GPU being maxed out is not a must for games, and it isn't what you want in the first place. If they are constantly maxed out you will get stuttering and framedrops, something you don't want. So having a "buffer space" in the usage is a good thing.

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usage on both cpu and gpu generally goes to about 50-60 in games, with fps in the 30-40 range.

games i've tested so far are Trine 2 and ETS2. i will test left 4 dead an tf2 once they are done downloading.

the issue is, in Euro truck simulator, there is no performance difference between scaling at 100% vs at 400%, but GPU usage goes up.

and trine 2 is locked at 20-30 fps with GPU utilization at 10-20%, and cpu at about 50% utilized.

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Not very intensive games, intensive games are like Battlefield 4 or Witcher (neither of which are on linux iirc). And yes, when you scale up the res, the GPU usage will go up/

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Trine 2 should get 60fps at least with a 7870, he's only getting 20-30 fps at every graphic preset. Something is going on.

1 Like
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gpu usage goes up, but fps is still 30-40. if that's the case, why don't i get better FPS when scaling is lower?

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and the other thing is, I can run these games perfectly in windows, but in linux, I'm having these issues. so it can't be a hardware problem.

17

Have you tried more demanding games?

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I don't have much of a linux library. is there a demanding ftp game on linux?

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I dunno about a free demanding game. But if you said that with unigine it performs as it should. I dunno, maybe someone else knows what's the issue here.
Besides the 100% fan speed using open source drivers, using the Radeon drivers does it performs as it should?

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i have tried unigen heaven, and it performs as expected on basic, and extreme.