I purchased a system76 Thelio Mira Elite With a AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT. I kinda regret not going with Nvidia at this point but it is what it is. I primarily use it as a developer workstation, but want to play games on it as well so I can be rid of my windows box.

I didn’t expect it to be able to play the latest and greatest games but I did expect it to be able to play older titles reasonably well. Games launch from steam and seem to work, but I’m getting between 0 and 10 fps on the title screen of Kerbal Space Program. Other games are similarly functional but poorly performing.

Where do I start? How can I ensure my GPU is being leveraged? Is this as good as it gets?

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    7 days ago

    Okay, after some poking around, I did find at least one mechanism that could possibly cause OpenGL to not be accelerated but Vulkan to be accelerated:

    https://superuser.com/questions/106056/force-software-based-opengl-rendering-on-ubuntu

    Alternately, you can set LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1, which will only affect programs started with that environment variable, not the entire system.

    I also confirmed that it produces the output that you’re seeing on my system – with that set, glxinfo returns llvmpipe, even though vulkaninfo has GPU id 0 being the Radeon card. So if you’ve got that environment variable set somewhere, that could produce the behavior you’re seeing.

    @zamithal@programming.dev, I don’t know how you could have gotten that set, but in whatever terminal you were running glxinfo and vulkaninfo, can you run set|strings|grep LIBGL and see if maybe that’s set? If it is, maybe unset LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE and then from that terminal start steam again and see if Kerbal Space Program runs fine then?

    • zamithal@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      It doesn’t appear to be set and additionally I don’t appear to have the libgl1-mesa-swx11 package mentioned in that post.

      set|strings|grep LIBGL

      apt list | grep libgl1-mesa

      libgl1-mesa-dev/jammy 24.0.3-1pop1~1711635559~22.04~7a9f319 amd64
libgl1-mesa-dev/jammy 24.0.3-1pop1~1711635559~22.04~7a9f319 i386
libgl1-mesa-dri/jammy,now 24.0.3-1pop1~1711635559~22.04~7a9f319 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libgl1-mesa-dri/jammy,now 24.0.3-1pop1~1711635559~22.04~7a9f319 i386 [installed,automatic]
libgl1-mesa-glx/jammy-updates 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1 amd64
libgl1-mesa-glx/jammy-updates 23.0.4-0ubuntu1~22.04.1 i386

      This does remind me that while developing a webgl canvas based javascript app the other day I was forced to go into firefox’s about:config and set webgl.force-enabled = true. I should have dug deeper on that.