I purchased a system76 Thelio Mira Elite With a AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT. I kinda regret not going with Nvidia at this point but it is what it is. I primarily use it as a developer workstation, but want to play games on it as well so I can be rid of my windows box.
I didn’t expect it to be able to play the latest and greatest games but I did expect it to be able to play older titles reasonably well. Games launch from steam and seem to work, but I’m getting between 0 and 10 fps on the title screen of Kerbal Space Program. Other games are similarly functional but poorly performing.
Where do I start? How can I ensure my GPU is being leveraged? Is this as good as it gets?
A 7900xt is like top 5 consumer graphics cards ever made at the moment, so 10 fps on a 15 year old game is not normal. I have the same card and just beat Control and Space Marines 2 with max settings with ray tracing and it constantly stayed above 100fps, with a vast majority of its time maxed at 144.
The first thing to do is to download CS2 and see where you’re at with max graphics, you should get steady 144fps. If CS2 works, it’s your games you’re playing, check proton db and see if there is some common advice on settings/boot configs. Proton GE and Feral gamemode are two common tricks. There’s also an option to trick games into thinking you’re on a steamdeck that’s becoming more common. If you see something unexpected with those configs, you may need to dig into your bios and make sure your card is behaving there, and there are some profiling tools for GPUs. You may have to update your drivers depending on your distro. Not all 7900 cards are the same, depending on the company designing the card’s case, you may get different behavior on things like fans.
Their are some GUI tools that profile AMD GPUs, but I’ve found they don’t show must more than
sensorsandlsusbshow.Yeah it appears my card isn’t being used at all, which explains the poor performance. Honestly the fact the system runs as well as it does without it is impressive. I’m reaching out to system76 for their diagnostics on why this might be
A simple thing to check is did you plug your HDMI into the card or the motherboard? If it’s in the motherboard, the card won’t be used.