Linux FPS drop after 30 min in game caused by mouse movement!?

[Zombob]

Hey Guys,

since a few days I experience FPS drop from 60 to unplayable after 30+ min in single player game on linux (A20 latest build 238).

I have tried to analyze this and can say, that its not GPU load, not CPU load, no mem swapping, not the "open file descriptor" problem on linux and not dynamic meshing (disabled).

 

I just realized when using mangohud to display FPS, that its the mouse movement! As soon when I move the mouse, the FPS drop from 60 to slide show, even while pausing the game with ESC. If I don't move, frames are at 60 again...

Not moving is boring - But if I try to quit to the title screen and reload the save, I get an crash every time the game is loading.

 

Log is attached - Frame drop starts at 22:33 (it says 40 FPS, thats a lie/averaged, its less).

Crash follows, but is too long for pastebin. If you're interested, I can mail it to you.

https://pastebin.com/44afd1RM

 

Thanks!

 

 

Edited December 25, 2021 by Zombob
added game version (see edit history)

[Beelzybub]

On 12/25/2021 at 2:22 PM, Zombob said:

I experience FPS drop from 60 to unplayable after 30+ min

I get the same thing using Vulcan. Switch to GLCore using the launcher to fix. Vulcan is not supported.

[DEATH MECHANIC]

On 12/25/2021 at 5:22 PM, Zombob said:

Hey Guys,

since a few days I experience FPS drop from 60 to unplayable after 30+ min in single player game on linux (A20 latest build 238).

I have tried to analyze this and can say, that its not GPU load, not CPU load, no mem swapping, not the "open file descriptor" problem on linux and not dynamic meshing (disabled).

 

I just realized when using mangohud to display FPS, that its the mouse movement! As soon when I move the mouse, the FPS drop from 60 to slide show, even while pausing the game with ESC. If I don't move, frames are at 60 again...

Not moving is boring - But if I try to quit to the title screen and reload the save, I get an crash every time the game is loading.

 

Log is attached - Frame drop starts at 22:33 (it says 40 FPS, thats a lie/averaged, its less).

Crash follows, but is too long for pastebin. If you're interested, I can mail it to you.

https://pastebin.com/44afd1RM

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

yes this happens when using vullkan because the game cannot manage the vram for your video card, so it fills it to its max,freezes and the shuts down the game. Its really a shame that vulkan is not supported yet because the game run's almost twice as good as using glcore. you can see a couple of screen shots that i posted here to see the difference,

look at the frame counter, not to mention the lighting difference. once you switch to glcore you will probably have to drop down some of the video settings to to get it to a playable state and even then its not the greatest gaming experience, its alot like trying to swim through jello sometimes especially when looking towards the HIGHAS@%$# or DISHONG buildings

 

Like i said its a shame its not working, if they would just support it, it would be the greatest performance boost for me over anything they have done before.

I run linux as well so i feel ya pain.

One piece of advice i can offer you that will actually help a small amount is to run the game with just 4 physical cores, no hyper threading or anything. good luck

 

Also the crash after you quit to the title screen and try to restart the game has been happening to me as well for a long time, so you just have to completely quit the game and relaunch it.

[Zombob]

Thanks for the hints!

"Good" to hear (or at least somewhat comforting) that others experience the problem as well.

 

Yes, swapping back to OpenGL helped avoiding the massive stutter, although like DM said, visual quality and performance are way better with Vulkan (for 30 minutes ). I still have the impression, that even with OpenGL rendering the game gets a bit sluggish after a while. But this can easily be caused by OpenGL beeing the bottleneck. I don't have any numbers yet and could not get mangohud running with OpenGL rendering so far. I also can't remember having these problems with A19 and Vulkan before...

 

I haven't seen vram fill up completely. During the last Vulkan session I recorded radeontop output and vram got filled up to 70%. It then already became practically unplayable. I did not have any crashes caused by vram overflow.

 

I am still convinced, that input processing has something to do with this in combination with Vulkan, since the frame drops even occured while moving the mouse in the in-game menu screen, like I said before. And without moving, I have solid 60 FPS (vsync).

[Zombob]

Ok, I think I've found a solution for this problem.       Nope, was just lucky, that it did not happen after 30 min. Still a problem

As I said, the stutter appeared after a while and only when using mouse or keys, so something with input processing.

 

After deactivating Steam Input (right click game  -> properties -> controller) I had a Vulkan session for 2h+ without any problems so far

The settings now look like this:

 

 

Edited December 30, 2021 by Zombob
didn't solve the problem (see edit history)

[DEATH MECHANIC]

That is weird we have the same freezing issue with vulkan but it seems for different reasons, glad you found something to work for you. I have always had this setting in the properties set to disable (just double checked it) so i don't think this is going to help for me 😞

i have mangohud working just fine and is reporting for both, have you added to to the launch command line? its the first tab in the properties menu called General, add this command to Launch Options:

mangohud %command%

Once in game you have to use shift+f12   and you have to use the shift key that is on the right side of the keyboard (weird i know)

 

 

[Zombob]

8 hours ago, DEATH MECHANIC said:

we have the same freezing issue with vulkan but it seems for different reasons

 

 

 

Oh that sucks - I'm sorry...

 

I have attached the log containing my config of yesterdays successful Vulkan run. Here everything went ok:

https://pastebin.com/wHL3VYuh

 

I've also recorded GPU load with radeontop (I have a RX580 using mesa drivers, I think). When I ended my session, this was the max vram usage (76% @ 6GB)

1640794688.912433: bus 01, gpu 67.50%, ee 0.00%, vgt 26.67%, ta 57.50%, sx 57.50%, sh 19.17%, spi 63.33%, sc 62.50%, pa 26.67%, db 57.50%, cb 41.67%, vram 76.07% 6196.87mb, gtt 29.80% 2439.52mb, mclk 100.00% 2.000ghz, sclk 100.00% 1.340ghz

 

My system specs from the log:

2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.762 INF Version: Alpha 20 (b238) Compatibility Version: Alpha 20, Build: Linux 64 Bit
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.762 INF System information:
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.762 INF    OS: Linux 5.4 Linux Mint 20.2 64bit
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.780 INF    CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6600 CPU @ 3.30GHz (cores: 4)
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.780 INF    RAM: 15963 MB
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.781 INF    GPU: AMD RADV POLARIS10 (ACO) (8192 MB)
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.781 INF    Graphics API: Vulkan 1.1.0 [0x05400003] (shader level 5.0)

 

 

I edited the "7DaysToDie.sh" in the games folder to enable mangohud. I still didn't manage to get it running with OpenGL, but this seems to be a known issue with mangohud on some configs. Using the Steam command line (mangohud %command%) also worked only with Vulkan.

#!/bin/sh

#export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
#export MALLOC_CHECK_=0

# -- Vulkan --
export MANGOHUD=1
# -- OpenGL -- (but doesn't work)
#export MANGOHUD_DLSYM=1
#export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mangohud/libMangoHud_dlsym.so:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mangohud/libMangoHud.so
./7dLauncher.x86_64 $@

 

[DEATH MECHANIC]

7 hours ago, Zombob said:

Oh that sucks - I'm sorry...

 

I have attached the log containing my config of yesterdays successful Vulkan run. Here everything went ok:

https://pastebin.com/wHL3VYuh

 

I've also recorded GPU load with radeontop (I have a RX580 using mesa drivers, I think). When I ended my session, this was the max vram usage (76% @ 6GB)

1640794688.912433: bus 01, gpu 67.50%, ee 0.00%, vgt 26.67%, ta 57.50%, sx 57.50%, sh 19.17%, spi 63.33%, sc 62.50%, pa 26.67%, db 57.50%, cb 41.67%, vram 76.07% 6196.87mb, gtt 29.80% 2439.52mb, mclk 100.00% 2.000ghz, sclk 100.00% 1.340ghz

 

My system specs from the log:

2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.762 INF Version: Alpha 20 (b238) Compatibility Version: Alpha 20, Build: Linux 64 Bit
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.762 INF System information:
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.762 INF    OS: Linux 5.4 Linux Mint 20.2 64bit
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.780 INF    CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6600 CPU @ 3.30GHz (cores: 4)
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.780 INF    RAM: 15963 MB
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.781 INF    GPU: AMD RADV POLARIS10 (ACO) (8192 MB)
2021-12-29T23:08:00 3.781 INF    Graphics API: Vulkan 1.1.0 [0x05400003] (shader level 5.0)

 

 

I edited the "7DaysToDie.sh" in the games folder to enable mangohud. I still didn't manage to get it running with OpenGL, but this seems to be a known issue with mangohud on some configs. Using the Steam command line (mangohud %command%) also worked only with Vulkan.

#!/bin/sh

#export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/i386/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
#export MALLOC_CHECK_=0

# -- Vulkan --
export MANGOHUD=1
# -- OpenGL -- (but doesn't work)
#export MANGOHUD_DLSYM=1
#export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mangohud/libMangoHud_dlsym.so:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mangohud/libMangoHud.so
./7dLauncher.x86_64 $@

 

skipping config: /media/stephan/nvme/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/7 Days To Die/MangoHud.conf [ not found ]

skipping config: /home/stephan/.config/MangoHud/7DaysToDie.x86_64.conf [ not found ]

skipping config: /home/stephan/.config/MangoHud/MangoHud.conf [ not found ]

 

The last line of this part of your log is where mine is different (says ok)

the config file its is looking for is made by another app called goverlay, you can get it in the package downloader, once you start it and set what you want to see info on, it will make the config file you are missing.

 

Other than having a NVIDIA card, we have a similar set up, even running 20.2 so maybe its something to do with the drivers. I have changed it to the latest but still no dice😞

[Zombob]

1 hour ago, DEATH MECHANIC said:

Other than having a NVIDIA card, we have a similar set up, even running 20.2 so maybe its something to do with the drivers.

Yep, thats my impression as well - The open-source Mesa drivers are said to be very capable when it comes to Vulkan with AMD GPUs (RADV). Even better than the proprietary AMDVLK drivers of AMD in certain aspects. And Nvidia seems to be slacking behind when it comes to linux driver support... There is an Mesa open-source implementation for Nvidia GPUs (Mesa Nouveau), but it's reverse engineered and not officially supported by Nvidia. The last time I tried to drive an Nvidia GPU with Mesa Nouveau (maybe 3 years ago) it was horrible and couldn't even display the desktop without lag... You can switch it in the system settings driver app, if you dare

 

So maybe no other option than waiting for better proprietary drivers or a game patch from TFP?

 

Thanks for the hints concerning mangohud, btw

 

[Zombob]

Oh sh... - I just got the shakes again! 🙈

Nothing solved here - back to square one

 

Happened during extensive base building...

[dimko]

I am not a Fun Pimp.

I suspect there may be an offending feature of some kind.

I know there is for me, I had to manipulate my configuration.

I play on 5700XT on Linux.

What I did, i switched off EVERYTHING, I made game really ugly, than switched on features one by one to see what was causing issues.

 

I am luckier than you, I had my FPS low immediately, after enabling some feature.

So I knew what is causing issues straight away.

 

[Zombob]

Hey there,

 

it's Alpha 21.2 b14 at the moment and I had a strangely positive surprise last week concerning Vulkan.

 

After doing my system updates on Linux Mint, it appeared that 7dtd would not load my savegame anymore. The game crashed after the loading screen reliably. So in order to get some debug information I ran the binary from the shell. But instead of a crash, the game started working again. And better than that: I tried to switch to the Vulkan renderer and did not have any lag since then so far. Admitted, I'm doing only 1-2 hour sessions at the moment but during that time it runs completely stable. The last time I tried to run the Vulkan renderer from the steam gui, lag occured after about 20 minutes game time.

 

Are there still people out there having the Vulkan problem with Radeon on Linux? If so, please check if this works for you.

 

1. Start Steam (the game needs it running in order to start)

2. Open a shell at SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/7 Days To Die/

3. Run the 7dLauncher.x86_64 binary

4. Select the Vulkan renderer and start

[Beelzybub]

I've been testing the Vulcan api on Mint with an Nvidia card and it's been working well if I keep Vsync off.

With vsync on, I get bad mouse lag.