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#1 2019-12-07 19:58:27

themusicalduck
Member
Registered: 2011-07-04
Posts: 123

Improving SteamVR performance just a little more. Momentary freezes.

EDIT: well I should have just gone with my first instinct because I have things running far better now.

I did two things and I'm not totally sure yet what made the biggest difference. I installed xf86-video-amdgpu and linux-git. Now things are really very smooth. There's still the occasionally stutter, but it's infrequent enough to be tolerable.

I actually think things might be working better than they do on windows. The strangest things is my GPU is no longer sounding like a jet engine like it does on windows. The fan is running far quieter even though I have it set to performance mode. It's not overheating either.

Looks like I might finally get to stop using windows. I'm so astonished at what valve have done with this,

Still if there are any more tips (or anything about getting rid of those few leftover stutters) then I'd still like to hear them.

I recently went from using an nvidia 970 graphics card to a more up to date AMD 5700XT. I'm glad I did because my linux gaming experience has improved tremendously. Additionally, the desktop feels far more responsive (who knew the reason the gnome shell overview search took a second or two to work was because of the nvidia drivers, it's instant now).

That said the final thing that keeps me using windows is SteamVR (and especially VRChat).

At first SteamVR on Arch with proton games was still too stuttery for me to use. However since updating to kernel 5.4, I'm suddenly able to get 80fps in VRChat in some worlds, which is amazing. Another game I play - VR Regatta also runs at around 80fps.

The only problem is that every few seconds, the picture will freeze for a moment. I tested it and the desktop also freezes (I moved the mouse around while SteamVR was running and could see it stop).

This one problem is the only thing preventing me from not having to use Windows ever.

Does anyone have some ideas, tips or ways to improve performance and prevent the freezes? There's so little information online about this, but I gather there are some patches that didn't make it into this kernel release and still relate to the 5700XT. Is it a case of waiting on more updates or is there something I can do now? I will at least try out linux-git and see if that makes any difference.

I also have quite an old CPU (3rd gen i5), which I want to remedy once budget allows. On Windows this does cause some lag, but not as badly. Could it be that the CPU is struggling because of extra overhead from proton? htop showed that while use was high, no cores were at 100%.

I have mesa-aco from the Valve repository installed (with normal mesa, SteamVR fails to run).

local/lib32-mesa-aco-git 20.0.0_devel.20191129.8a8381dd604-8
local/mesa-aco-git 20.0.0_devel.20191129.8a8381dd604-7

and 5.4.2-arch1-1 for the kernel.

I'm using amdgpu and haven't installed anything else amd related except for radeon-profile-daemon-git. I'm using X11 with Gnome and there is no xorg conf file.

Thanks!

Last edited by themusicalduck (2019-12-07 22:29:09)

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