Low FPS in games at high monitor refresh rates

English Games
1

Hello everyone,
Since the last round of updates, my in-game FPS has dropped quite dramatically when I run my monitor at its native refresh rate of 144Hz. Most of the games I play aren’t particularly graphics intensive, and have no problem running at or near 144FPS. However since this last update they run at ~25FPS. This also happens if I set the refresh rate to 120Hz. However, at 60Hz, the games all run at 60FPS.
I’m using KDE Plasma Wayland, I can’t test this with X11 since X11 doesn’t detect the high refresh rates. The desktop runs just fine at 144Hz, it’s butter smooth, this is only an issue in game.
Is there something I can do to help diagnose / fix this issue?
Thank you

2

I don’t know for certain, but poke around looking for vsync settings, and turn them off. Either in the plasma settings, or in your games themselves.

3

Good catch, I set adaptive sync to off in plasma settings and that has fixed it. Previously I had this set to automatic and it hasn’t caused me issues. Thanks for that, quite a simple work around for now. I’ll keep trying it in future updates to see if it gets fixed.

4

So that wasn’t it unfortunately. Last time something else must have changed to fix it. I haven’t done anything else other than disabling adaptive sync. After I had done so it was fixed, but since the last round of updates the problem is back. Anything else I can try?

5

You should post the relevant hardware details to start with:

inxi -GSa
6

Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 5.27.6 tk: Qt v: 5.15.10 wm: kwin_wayland vt: 3
dm: SDDM Distro: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20230728
Graphics:
Device-1: AMD Navi 31 [Radeon RX 7900 XT/7900 XTX] vendor: ASRock
driver: amdgpu v: kernel arch: RDNA-3 code: Navi-3x process: TSMC n5 (5nm)
built: 2022+ pcie: gen: 4 speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16 ports: active: DP-1
empty: DP-2,DP-3,HDMI-A-1 bus-ID: 03:00.0 chip-ID: 1002:744c
class-ID: 0300
Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.8 with: Xwayland v: 23.1.2
compositor: kwin_wayland driver: X: loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa
dri: radeonsi gpu: amdgpu display-ID: 0
Monitor-1: DP-1 res: 3840x2160 size: N/A modes: N/A
API: OpenGL v: 4.6 Mesa 23.1.4 renderer: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX (gfx1100
LLVM 16.0.6 DRM 3.52 6.4.6-1-default) direct-render: Yes
Kernel: 6.4.6-1

7

So again, it fixed itself since yesterday? The only thing that happened overnight is my screen auto turned off. It’s obviously an intermittent issue.

8

I tried to search for hints on this matter in connection with your Plasma/Wayland combination and all I could find was that 8 month old reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/zdhix7/kwin_now_allows_to_turn_off_vsync_on_wayland/

To me it seems not to be too far fetched that it still is an ongoing process to disable vrr by default on KDE/kwin with wayland.

Maybe the config got changed with a kwin update in your case. I can’t really investigate that as I don’t use KDE on Wayland, nor do I have an AMD GPU.

9

So here is a better description of the issue. I reboot, I get ~25FPS in games. I let my PC idle for some minutes to allow the screen to time out, sign back in, I easily get 144FPS again in games.

10

Sounds like there is an issue with the variable refresh rate. Not necesseray solvable on a user level though… you could also check if it has an effect when you switch from full screen to window mode and back.

I mean, for most distros that use KDE Wayland is not the default. My guess is that they will fix such issues faster once there are more users with KDE on Wayland.

Edit: I assume vrr is currently switched on!?

11

I did try switching from full screen to windowed and it did not help. Is variable refresh rate the same thing as adaptive sync?

12

Yes, it’s the same thing. I thought KDE calls it variable refresh rate, not sure though. Some other software publishers like Nvidia or AMD or Xorg have different names for it.

13

Don’t know if it is indeed the issue, but even if I had it set to off the FPS would still be low.

14

Hmm… did you try to set it manually? To be honest it has been a while since I did that the last time and back then I used xrandr. I don’t know if that is still the up-to-date method also I don’t know how xrandr works on Wayland.

I couldn’t quickly find a openSUSE wiki page for setting the refresh rate, just this: SDB:Configuring graphics cards - openSUSE Wiki

I am going to leave that here, hoping nobody get’s mad at me for linking to other distro’s wiki pages:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/xrandr

15

Just an update on this issue. It’s been fixed in kernel 6.5. Everything is working as it should once again. Thanks for your help!

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