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?
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
I also confirmed that it produces the output that you’re seeing on my system – with that set,
glxinfo
returns llvmpipe, even thoughvulkaninfo
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.@[email protected], I don’t know how you could have gotten that set, but in whatever terminal you were running
glxinfo
andvulkaninfo
, can you runset|strings|grep LIBGL
and see if maybe that’s set? If it is, maybeunset LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE
and then from that terminal startsteam
again and see if Kerbal Space Program runs fine then?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
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.
Ah, okay. Bit of a long shot.
You shouldn’t need it – that’s for software rendering.
You might want libgl1-mesa-glx, but it sounds from that page like that was restructured prior to your distro release.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1517352/issues-installing-libgl1-mesa-glx
Both libgl1:amd64 and libglx-mesa-0:amd64 are installed on my system. Are they installed on yours? If not, if they are available in your apt repo, maybe do so and see if your problems disappear?