[AMD GPU] Drastic performance drop in video games after system update [openSUSE Tumbleweed]

English Hardware
1

I have the following problem:

  1. I recently discovered that the performance in games (I play only through Steam) dropped drastically after the system update. The number of FPS dropped several times. All games start up, the graphics card is detected correctly in all the games I have checked, but the extremely low FPS does not allow any game play.
  2. Previously, when playing more demanding games (Steam), I could always hear the coil of my graphics card (characteristic coil whine).
  3. This coil howling (coil squealing) has been missing for some time now, and video games have become unplayable.
  4. A system update did not help (zypper dup).
  5. When I rolled back to an earlier snapshot via snapper the problem disappeared. Unfortunately, I had to go back to the snapper of 09.2024, because the later ones were unfortunately from 02.2025 and in them the problem always occurs.
  6. In the snapper of 09.2024 the problem does not occur at all. You can hear the characteristic squeaking of the graphics card coil, and games have normal performance.
  7. After updating the system from the 09.2024 snapshot to the current version of openSUSE Tumbleweed, the problem occurs again. And this always happens, despite several attempts.
    7b) Wayland or X11 - no change, the problem still occurs.
  8. I do not know what is the cause of this condition. Maybe the problem is more obvious than I think (I hope).
  9. Below are my specifications. I would be happy to send the logs if you would give me a bit of guidance.

PROCESSOR: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core @ 3.80GHz
Core Count: 16
Thread Count: 32
Extensions: SSE 4.2 + AVX2 + AVX + RDRAND + FSGSBASE
Cache Size: 64 MB
Microcode: 0xa20102d
Core Family: Zen 3
Scaling Driver: amd-pstate-epp powersave (Boost: Enabled EPP: power)

GRAPHICS: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT 16GB
BAR1 / Visible vRAM: 16368 MB
OpenGL: 4.6 Mesa 25.0.0 (LLVM 19.1.7 DRM 3.60)
Monitor: LC49G95T
Screen: 5120x1440

MOTHERBOARD: ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII DARK HERO
BIOS Version: 4805
Chipset: AMD Starship/Matisse
Audio: AMD Navi 21/23
Network: Realtek RTL8125 2.5GbE + Intel I211 + Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200

MEMORY: 64GB

DISK: 2 x 2000GB Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB
+ 4 x 8002GB Seagate ST8000NE001-2M71
+ 2GB Storage Media
File-System: xfs
Mount Options: attr2 inode64 logbsize=32k logbufs=8 noquota relatime rw
Disk Scheduler: NONE
Disk Details: Block Size: 4096

OPERATING SYSTEM: openSUSE 20250226
Kernel: 6.13.4-1-default (x86_64)
Desktop: KDE Plasma 6.3.1
Display Server: X Server 1.21.1.15 + Wayland
Compiler: GCC 14.2.1 20241007 [revision 4af44f2cf7d281f3e4f3957efce10e8b2ccb2ad3]

2

[PROBLEM SOLVED / SOLUTION]: I managed to solve the problem. It seems that the problem was improper power management. Switching energy profiles and re-enabling the Performance profile apparently solved the problem.

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