Steam Big Picture bad performance on AMD GPU
Games and overlay work great outside of the Steam Big Picture mode. Big Picture looks like its getting around 20 fps, which should probably not be the case for my hardware. Any advice would be appreciated. Unfortunately, disabling the GPU blacklist in BP settings did not resolve my issue.
Operating System: Bazzite 40
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.5.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.9.12-205.fsync.fc40.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core Processor
Memory: 31.3 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
Product Name: X570 Phantom Gaming 4 WiFi ax
17 Replies
Which games have you tested and at what resolution and gfx settings? I have a 7800XT and can test.
So this isn't really a game issue, games run fine. The interface itself runs at a really low framerate, target resolution is only 1080p.
I've played around with all of these settings, nothing really seems to help.
I can reproduce this on the Rog Ally. Game mode runs perfectly. Big Picture Mode is laggy
Wish I could easily copy to plaintext, but this is what BPM reports for my hardware setup:
Something worth noting I think is that my system ramps up quite a bit even when I'm just idling on a screen. I assume that it's not utilizing hardware acceleration correctly and maybe my CPU is getting taxed? I'll do some additional testing in a little while if I can.
Just to check, is this regular Bazzite? Not the -Deck variant right? And by Big Picture mode you mean the Big Picture mode in regular Steam and not game mode?
That is correct, this is the standard desktop build with gamemode disabled, just running big picture. AMD drivers were selected for the image, and I can confirm in discover I have the most current mesa drivers.
This is a fairly clean installation as well, just got it set up as of last night.
@Freakalope yep I've been able to reproduce this on my system. Big Picture in desktop mode is laggy af.
On the flip side, game mode works without any issues.
So since you're on AMD anyways, why not just rebase to the deck image and use game mode?
I would if I could auto boot into the desktop environment, but as far as I'm aware its an all or nothing decision. I guess I'll just hope it improves at some point.
You can autoboot to desktop if you want, I forgot how I did it but I think it had something to do with
steamos-session-select. Can look it up if you'd like.It's not really a big deal, seeing as this appears to be an issue affecting multiple users I think I'd rather see if valve can address it at some point, performance for big picture has been kind of all over the place since launch even on windows. Thanks for looking into reproducing it.
I had something similar but in Nvidia. Running desktop UI and then switch to big picture mode would make the client really laggy.
But launching directly into big picture mode from the terminal (
bazzite-steam -tenfoot) would make the lag disappear.
I would like to ask anyone with a handheld / AMD desktop to try and reproduce this behavior, as might point to some kind of issue at the moment of switching to big picture mode, rather than big picture itself being the problemInteresting, that worked for me (Radeon 680M APU).
Just tested on my Rog Ally (Z1 Extreme) and I can reproduce the lag when switching from Steam desktop to Steam BPM. When I use your solution (
bazzite-steam -tenfoot) it is smooth