Arch Linux

columbarius

Member

Registered: 2018-07-08

Posts: 11

High CPU load when running games with steam play

Hi,

I recently heard from the steam play feature and tried to test it with Age of Empires 2 HD and Ori and the blind forest, both not recommended by steam, but marked as working on protondb,  on my notebook (XPS 13, i7-7500U, HD Graphics 620, 8GB). The games worked, but every time the fan was spinning up and the notebook got very hot, cpu temperatures up to 100°C. Htop showed the game executable spawned two times, with cpu loads at 140% and 100%. Those seemed a bit high for an old game, so I tested it on an desktop pc (i5-6400, GeForce GTX 970 with nvidia driver) with the same setup with corresponding drivers. Every time I started the game, the fan was spinning up and though better cooling, the temperature only reached 40°C, while the htop output stayed the same. Is there a reason, why the cpu load is that high, or is there something to tweak or a wrong setup?

Any ideas, experiences?

ps aux:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
kodi      9112  0.0  0.7 608884 125872 ?       S    01:04   0:00 /home/kodi/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam
kodi      9118  6.7  0.0  46480 12332 ?        Rs   01:04   0:28 /home/kodi/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Proton 3.16 Beta/dist/bin/wineserver
kodi      9122  0.0  0.1 1984276 29632 ?       Ssl  01:04   0:00 C:\windows\system32\services.exe
kodi      9125  0.0  0.2 1936648 36104 ?       Sl   01:04   0:00 C:\windows\system32\winedevice.exe
kodi      9134  0.0  0.1 1852952 28984 ?       Sl   01:04   0:00 C:\windows\system32\plugplay.exe
kodi      9139  0.2  0.2 1934360 37056 ?       Sl   01:04   0:00 C:\windows\system32\winedevice.exe
kodi      9147  0.0  0.2 1887716 40900 ?       Ssl  01:04   0:00 C:\windows\system32\explorer.exe /desktop
kodi      9153  0.0  0.1 2049596 29384 ?       Sl   01:04   0:00 C:\windows\system32\rpcss.exe
kodi      9203  140  0.9 3057568 161864 ?      Rl   01:04   9:56 Z:\home\kodi\.local\share\Steam\steamapps\common\Age2HD\Launcher.exe
kodi      9206  0.6  0.3 137700 56764 ?        Sl   01:04   0:02 /home/kodi/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayui -pid 9203 -steampid 7426 -manuallyclearframes 0 -gameid 221380
kodi      9208  0.0  0.4 469584 67336 ?        Sl   01:04   0:00 /home/kodi/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_64/steamwebhelper --type=renderer --no-sandbox --disable-features=AsyncWheelEvents,TouchpadAndWheelScrollLatching --disable-gpu-compositing --service-pipe-token=************************** --enable-blink-features=ResizeObserver,Worklet,AudioWorklet --lang=de --log-file=/home/kodi/.local/share/Steam/logs/cef_log.txt --product-version=Valve Steam Client --webview-urls=http://localhost/*,http://steamloopback.host/*,https://steamloopback.host/*,https://localhost/* --num-raster-threads=2 --enable-main-frame-before-activation --service-request-channel-token=************************** --renderer-client-id=5 --shared-files=v8_context_snapshot_data:100,v8_natives_data:101

remark: the second Z:\home\kodi\.local\share\Steam\steamapps\common\Age2HD\Launcher.exe entry with PID 9204 from htop is not appearing in ps.
remark: the kodi user is just a normal user, which i use as the multimedia and gaming user on this system.

nvidia-smi:

 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 418.56       Driver Version: 418.56       CUDA Version: 10.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 970     Off  | 00000000:09:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 30%   45C    P5    22W / 151W |    192MiB /  4034MiB |     24%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1040      G   /usr/lib/Xorg                                 12MiB |
|    0      2465      G   /usr/lib/Xorg                                111MiB |
|    0      5286      G   /usr/lib/Xorg                                 12MiB |
|    0      7426      G   ...di/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam    21MiB |
|    0      7433      G   ./steamwebhelper                               3MiB |
|    0      9203      G   ...am\steamapps\common\Age2HD\Launcher.exe    26MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+