Source engine very poor performance on Linux

[blueskull]

Hi all,

 

I am experiencing very poor performance on my Linux machine. CS:CZ runs smoothly, Unigine Valley runs at a lower FPS, but at least it gives me 30 fps, despite it gives my 70 fps on Windows.

However, the 2 Source engine games I tried, HL2 and L4D2, run very sluggish. All animations are so so, but not too bad. Whenever I move my mouse or keyboard, it starts to freeze. In the meanwhile, FPS remains >=60.

I know I am running on a particularly awful CPU, but on the same CPU using Windows, I get super smooth experience on both games. I can even run HL2 smoothly on iGPU (i5-4250U) even under Linux.

I highly suspect it is due to bad GPU driver. Can anyone confirm that AMD driver is sluggish even with not very demanding games like HL2 or L4D2?

So far I've tried fglrx in 15.10 repo, Crimson 15 from binary and AMDGPU in 16.04 kernel, and the latter one is worse, but both 3 suck.

 

Here is the hardware list:

ASRock X99E ITX ac

Xeon E5-2603V3 (I use this CPU before E5V4 BIOS releases, I have a 2696V4 on my hand, but I do not want to risk frying it)

AMD R9 nano

32GB ECC 2400 RDIMM*2 (derated to 1600 due to limitation of CPU)

 

Once again, can anyone confirm that Source engine is not compatible with AMD drivers in Linux?

 

 

 

Thanks,

Bo

[Majestic]

Afaik, AMD's OpenGL is pretty poor compared to Nvidia. But linux gaming is still pretty terrible.

 

Forever windows...

[blueskull]

5 minutes ago, Majestic said:

Afaik, AMD's OpenGL is pretty poor compared to Nvidia. But linux gaming is still pretty terrible.

 

Forever windows...

I mean, I got <50% CPU usage on the mostly used core and pretty 60 FPS (jumps between 60 and 240, I enabled Vsync).

But it simply freezes, and the GPU fan runs like a chipper taking off.

I should try an NV card and see how it does.

 

If I have, I probably will move to Windows, but I will try to stay with Linux as long as it is even slightly possible, since doing all advanced networking and other services on Windows is too difficult, and I simply can not live without a real ANSI POSIX terminal and a well built in SSH server. Also, I need this machine to be online 24*7, so Windows 7 is not an option, while I do not want to spend $800 on a Windows Server license. Any newer versions of Windows are impossible, since the spying policy of Win10 buggers me so much.