Poor Performance w/ R9 290 on KDE Neon

Hey everyone I recently switched from Ubuntu Gnome to KDE Neon, so far everything is awesome expect for gaming performance. On Ubuntu Gnome most games I could get around 60 fps but on Neon in some games I’m getting under 30 in most titles. For example in Hearts of Iron IV I’m getting 7 fps and it is not a graphically demanding game. My CPU also shouln’t be contributing to this HOI4 isn’t so intense in the early game and I have an i7-4770k. Anyways everything right now is the same I was using the Obiaf ppa on both but getting much better performance with Gnome. Could this be a Plasma issue? I’ve also tried to disable compositing but that doesn’t help either. Does anyone have any suggestions or hints for a solution. Also a general thank you to this community, I’ve been able to find a lot of solutions lurking on here.

What versions of Ubuntu Gnome and Neon have you used? Also do you happen to know the versions of the drivers being used on both?

What is the GPU? What kernel version? What is the version of Mesa and/or LLVM? It is possible that you may have some older libs or kernel mismatch with the PPAs that you are pulling in.

@tech0 does have the GPU in the subject line the R9 290.

Sounds like his GPU is stuck in low-performance mode.

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Did you try the actual amd drivers and control centre it mite help explain what is going on a bit more

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

On linux you don’t download the drivers from there, you get them from package manager, and if you have a recent distro the drivers are a part of the kernel itself.

Link was for control centre.

Control center is windows only. OP is on linux.

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@TheIdiotYouYellat Yeah it was the same 16.04 as the base. The version of Mesa I’m using is 17.3 from git and LLVM is at 5.0 from the obiaf ppa here. Driver is the same from both.

@Mastic_Warrior 290 (Hawaii) with the above drivers. The kernel versions I’ve tried are the stock Hardware Enablement Kernel from Ubuntu (4.10) and mainlines kernels 4.10.17 & 4.13.8. No worries about the brain fart :smiley:

blackfire Thanks for pitching in to help but I’m on Linux. Wish we had the control center :stuck_out_tongue:

Dynamic_Gravity Do you have a command I can use to check if it’s in low power mode. I know how to check stuff like the CPU governor but didn’t realize we could also check the GPU’s

Yeah, had a brain fart.

If you are on 16.04, verify the kernel. Some people had issues with their 290s, 290Xs, and 390s until kernel 4.12. It seems that AMD did not make them equal.

If you check out phoronix.com, Micheal has documented his issues with the 290 and eventually got it working well. I think he also was using the Obaif PPAs.

Yeah I’ve tried kernel 4.13.8 and 4.10.17. I also like reading his benchmarks!

I am not familiar with KDE Neon.

Are you running X or Wayland as the display server?

Also, are you passing boot options to the kernel like nomodeset?

I’m using X and no I’m not using nomodeset right now. Neon should be the same as Ubuntu 16.04.3 right now it just updates Qt and KDE stuff as it comes out.

What does glxinfo state?
Anything weird in dmesg or /var/log?
Have you tried amdgpu instead of radeonsi?

So I checked on the Gentoo wiki under power management and used the command listed there to find my power method. It’s dpm which according to the Arch wiki is what it should be for most AMD graphics cards since kernel 3.11. Thanks for the hint though!

So really weird it looks like glxinfo isn’t in the repos… not sure why. I’ll try to install the package in a little bit. Heres the > errors from my dmesg you might be on the right track it looks like something is up with dpm.

[    3.619956] [drm:ci_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* ci_upload_dpm_level_enable_mask failed
[ 2772.619042] [drm:ci_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* ci_upload_dpm_level_enable_mask failed
[14930.783400] [drm:ci_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* ci_upload_dpm_level_enable_mask failed
[63158.522210] [drm:ci_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* ci_upload_dpm_level_enable_mask failed
[79715.464551] [drm:ci_dpm_set_power_state [radeon]] *ERROR* ci_upload_dpm_level_enable_mask failed

I tried amdgpu before but there seems to be some weirdness with Neon regarding that. I’ll provide some details in a bit I have to go for a few hours. Thank you so much for the help. @Dynamic_Gravity Thank you too it looks like you were on to something!

Woops * scuttles away*

Are you using the latest firmware fo CI?