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#1 2016-10-26 03:10:12

cubethethird
Member
Registered: 2016-01-25
Posts: 61
Website

Steam game performance degredation in Xorg after recent updates

My setup is as follows:
gnome-shell desktop environment, running in Xorg mode, updated to 3.22.1+2+g5a08886-1 currently
hybrid graphics with intel integrated and nvidia discrete cards, handled by bumblebee
nvidia drivers at 370.28-2
kernel at 4.8.4-1

My new problem:
Certain steam games experience poor performance, whereas they ran reasonably before these updates.
The game that this most notably affects is 7 days to die, and it appears as though the issue mainly affects games made in Unity, or at least running through mono.
Games such as portal 2, and even non-steam games like minecraft run without issue.

Also, the issue only seems to persist in Xorg mode. When logging into gnome with Wayland, performance is as it was previously (though unplayable due to mouse position issues).

I am seeking any advice on how to properly diagnose the issue, correct it, or at last see if the issue affects others.

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#2 2016-11-05 01:16:50

nambot
Member
Registered: 2016-11-05
Posts: 12

Re: Steam game performance degredation in Xorg after recent updates

Hi cubethethird,

I got similar problems. OpenGL performance with Intel IGP degraded after the upgrade to gnome 3.22.
I noticed it with the steam game "Awesomenauts".

Hardware:
CPU: Intel Core i5-6600
GPU: Intel HD Graphics 530 (integraded GPU)

The problem
I'm sorry, I can't pinpoint it on any specific package, since I downgraded everything back to gnome 3.20.
The problem occured with mesa 12.0.3-3, so I haven't tried mesa 13 yet.

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#3 2016-11-10 04:22:14

cubethethird
Member
Registered: 2016-01-25
Posts: 61
Website

Re: Steam game performance degredation in Xorg after recent updates

Just updated the kernel to 4.8.6, along with mesa 13 and Nvidia drivers. No change from what I can see. At this rate I feel I'll just wait for X.org 1.19 to come out, and start using Wayland with XWayland for games.

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#4 2017-01-10 19:30:55

nambot
Member
Registered: 2016-11-05
Posts: 12

Re: Steam game performance degredation in Xorg after recent updates

Hi cubethethird,

do you have any news on this issue? What package-versions do you have installed now?

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#5 2017-01-10 21:17:41

cubethethird
Member
Registered: 2016-01-25
Posts: 61
Website

Re: Steam game performance degredation in Xorg after recent updates

Currently I have the most recent stable release versions available for arch: Nvidia 375.26, xorg-server 1.18.4, gnome-shell 3.22.2 and mesa 13.0.3. There is no change to the performance of affected games from current testing.

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#6 2017-01-15 18:24:09

cubethethird
Member
Registered: 2016-01-25
Posts: 61
Website

Re: Steam game performance degredation in Xorg after recent updates

Just confirming that yes, the issue persists for me after updating xorg-server to 1.19.1. I suspect the issue lies solely with gnome shell.

It should also be noted that games seem to be perfectly playable using Wayland with the fixes introduced in xorg.

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#7 2017-01-30 18:06:48

ferreum
Member
Registered: 2017-01-30
Posts: 1

Re: Steam game performance degredation in Xorg after recent updates

I had video stuttering in games where the screen would shortly freeze about once a second starting with Linux 4.8. The games I saw this issue with are Broforce and Distance which are both unity games.
Changing any other package versions besides Linux did not change anything about it. My preemptive solution at first was to use linux-lts.

With strace I see the game in a long poll() on the X socket fd while the game hangs.

I now bisected the issue to Linux commit ea0000f0d369a59c2086fe9c489e0a2a86e080ba.
Searching for that led me to this thread: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93782
People are having various issues with this change, but the fix works for my issue too (NOPE this was not the fix, see edit below):

Add "video=SVIDEO-1:d" to the kernel command line as in (assuming using grub):
/etc/default/grub

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=SVIDEO-1:d"

and rebuild the grub config with

# grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

This disables the SVIDEO connector, which is not even available on my hardware.

EDIT:
Well I'll be damned. Just started up a game after posting this and the issue was back. Turns out the SVIDEO parameter was not the fix at all. I must have lost track of what I changed to get this working.
The ACTUAL fix was that I had xf86-video-intel running with

Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"

I removed that option from my xorg config now and the game runs fine. Curiously the game is stuttering even when I'm running xorg with modesetting without xf86-video-intel.

Last edited by ferreum (2017-01-30 18:40:16)

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