Slackware -current, horrible game performance problems with Team Fortress 2, and possibly other games
 

I am a long time Slackware user, probably since around 2014. I have used and abused it as a daily driver because of it's rock solid stability until about a year ago. An issue I've had for a LONG TIME, and I can't find a straight answer for anywhere, is that when I play games like Team Fortress 2, it runs REALLY BADLY. I'm talking 20-40FPS in 2fort. I am using AMDGPU. All of my friends reciprocate this issue. It does not happen in other distributions. I have tested it in Void Linux, Gentoo, Ubuntu and Fedora and they all run perfectly fine. I can't recall if other games were affected, or if they were, how measurably so, but TF2 is the glaring example because I have thousands of hours in it, and can scratch my head about it being a 12 year old game struggling to run on a Ryzen 2600 and an R9 390. I miss Slackware on the desktop so much, because it's never given me problems from a general use perspective. I've consistently used it on the laptop this whole time and every time I boot it I breathe a sigh of relief, because it offers something very few alternatives do. If anyone can do some investigation into this issue, it would be appreciated.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the only person I know who DOESN'T have this problem is a friend who has been slowly upgrading his 14.2 installation manually since 2016, including kernel, X11, mesa, etc. Something must have changed in that time, and I assume that only few have noticed, let alone said anything about it. Keep in mind, I'm not the only one having this issue.

Are you running TF2 as Native Linux, or with Wine or SteamPlay? Also, what kernel?

I have absolutely no idea what's causing this, but: what other games?

Also: have you tried running TF2 with Feral Game Mode?

Links?

you have to have the last amdgpu, mesa and vulkan for the amdgpu to work well

slack no games :(

Slackware -current, horrible game performance problems with Team Fortress 2, and possibly other games
 

^ then why is my wife so upset with me?

Are the game settings, hardware, map location, and number of players on teams the same for each distribution you tested Team Fortress 2 on? I think Team Fortress 2 and CSGO are unoptimized. Valve needs to put some effort in and update their games to Vulkan. Slackware runs Doom 2016 great. I know someone who used Debian who found CSGO as unoptimized as me and they were surprised that they lost performance with better hardware. I have a friend who uses Windows 7 with a slightly better CPU than me and they also have poor performance with CSGO. I scratch my head at who can run these games at 300 FPS.

Native Linux.
Kernel 5.4.10. Slackware -current updated all the way. I did a fresh install this morning.

It's purely anecdotal, but I know 3 people who have the same issue on Slackware -current.

I can run TF2 at a consistent 130-200FPS in full Thundermountan servers (VERY intensive map) in other Linux systems, and Windows (which I reinstalled as a benchmark reference.) In 2fort, the lightest map in the game, I get really bad frames on Slackware and I can't figure it out for the life of me. I know these games are unoptimized sacks of trash, but at the end of the day I've been playing for well over a decade and I'm not going to stop now.

Are you actually serious? If so, whatever makes you think that?

Yeah, the less said about my Steam backlog, the better. :D

* Cough

And btw: cool that you know 3 other slackware-current users.

I found this page in the Arch Wiki:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...or_instability

I am already using those kernel parameters, as I have enabled AMDGPU. It should be mentioned as well that it matters not which card is being used, my pal gets about as bad of performance as I do on a Vega 56. I have also had the same issue on an HD7950.

It should also be said that it's not just TF2, I tested Day of Defeat Source and it ran at about 30-45FPS.

Not sure why you keep ignoring and ignoring and ignoring advice to try this:

https://github.com/FeralInteractive/gamemode