Many of us are notorious fence-sitters. This video attempts to explore some of the psychology of our profound hesitation when switching operating systems. I will share my personal experience, talk about some of the fears we face when making big changes, offer some warm encouragement, and do it all without a whiff of the elitist technobabble that tends to rear its ugly head in Linux discussions.

This is a big release, adding several new major features:

• Nvidia support! LACT now works with Nvidia GPUs for all of the core functionality (monitoring, clocks configuration, power limits and fan control). It uses the NVML library, so unlike the Nvidia control panel it doesn't rely on X11 extensions and works under Wayland.
• Multiple profiles for configuration. Currently it is not possible to switch them automatically, but they are configurable through the UI or the unix socket.
• Clocks configuration now works on AMD IGPUs (at least RDNA2). Previously it was not parsed properly due to lack of VRAM settings.
• Zero RPM mode settings on RDNA3. Currently this needs a linux-next to be used, and the functionality is expected to land in kernel 6.13. But this resolves a long-standing issue with RDNA3 that made the fan always disabled below a certain temperature, even if using a custom curve.

There are many other improvements as well, such as better looking and more efficient plots rendering in the historical charts window (thanks to @In-line ) and a Fedora COPR repository providing LACT packages (currently in testing).

Nvidia showcase:

Full list of changes:

🚀 Features

• Add support for multiple settings profiles (#327)
• Show dialog when attempting to reconnect to daemon
• Include device info and stats responses in debug snapshot
• Improve plot rendering, use supersampling and do it in a background thread
• [breaking] Add initial Nvidia support (#388)
• Implement clocks control on Nvidia (#398)
• Add special case for invalid throttle mask
• Add snapshot command to CLI
• Add RDNA3 zero RPM setting (#393)

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Getting pci info in snapshot
• Retry reading p-states if the value is nonsensical
• Increase retry intervals when evaluating GPUs at start
• Make throttling flags ellipsized to avoid massively oversized window (#402)
• Deduplicate throttle status bits
• Update amdgpu-sysfs with iGPU fixes, add steam deck quirk (#407)
• Fedora spec non-default builds (#410)

🚜 Refactor

• Make info page a relm component (#404)
• Drop redundant ClockSettings structure in the ui

📚 Documentation

• Update issue template to mention common RDNA3 problems
• Fix issue template yaml
• Move description to label in issue template

⚙️ Miscellaneous Tasks

• Bump version
• Update docs, enforce minimum rust version
• Set codegen-units=1 to decrease binary size in release (#390)
• Include service log in debug snapshot
• Drop old bench feature
• Bump dependencies
• Bump version
• Remove unused Cargo features (#405)

Developer

• Automatically create release on tag push
• Trigger workflow on tag push
• Bump workflow rust version
• Add debug builds to makefile
• Skip building signed packages if signing secret is not found
• Don't run rust checks on master pushes, only PRs

Packaging

• Add libdrm to debian dependencies
• Add fedora 41 package (#399)
• Generate Spec Files for COPR on Release Publish (#406)
• Drop invalid copr trigger check

I got free keys from prime for those, dont intend to use them.

CPU: Ryzen 9 7900X3D

Mainboard: ASUS TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS WIFI

GPU: Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XTX Gaming OC 24GB

I had to switch from the Ryzen 7 7800X3D because there is a huge shortage where I live, and it got to the point where it was €100 more than the Ryzen 9. I know I will have a slight performance hit if the game uses the non-3D V-Cache, but I prefer that to spending almost €150 more than the MSRP.

Little side question: Will the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the motherboard work in Arch? From what I could gather, the drivers for it should be in the latest kernel, but I'm not 100% sure.

It's not on Steam so I can't find anything out about it on ProtonDB, but does anyone know how well this game/version runs on Linux?

I have a laptop that I want to turn into a dedicated retro console and arcade emulation rig. I know there are things like RetroPie for raspi, are there any similar flavors for amd64? I'm basically looking for a similar "one stop shop" UI experience.

So, I bought an RX 7600 XT, when I was still using my 10 year old TV. Recently upgraded to an LG C4, reading the news about AMD support for HDMI 2.1 on Linux, I also went looking for a DP->HDMI adapter and found one that claims to even support VRR. After a week of getting random audio cuts, suspecting the adapter was at fault, I went pure HDMI...

To my surprise, I could run at 4K 120hz with VRR and HDR. Doesn't that require HDMI 2.1?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/28042544

Cross-posted from "DLSS Frame Generation is now available on Proton Experimental" by @Blxter@lemmy.zip in !linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

Added support for NVIDIA Optical Flow API and DLSS 3 Frame Generation.

Memory managment

Resource and memory management were completely rewritten in order to use allocated video memory more efficiently:

• Reduced fragmentation may reduce peak memory usage in games such as God of War by up to 1 GiB in extreme cases.
• Memory defragmentation is now performed periodically to return some unused memory back to the system. The goal is not to reduce VRAM usage at all costs; instead this is done conservatively if the system is under memory pressure, or if a significant amount of allocated memory is unused. Keeping some unused memory is useful to quickly service subsequent allocations.

Note: Defragmentation is currently disabled on Intel's ANV driver, see #4434. The dxvk.enableMemoryDefrag config option can be set to enable or disable this feature via the the Configuration file.

Driver support

While technically not required, the new memory management works best on drivers that support both VK_EXT_memory_budget and VK_KHR_maintenance5. The Driver Support page was updated accordingly.

D3D8 / D3D9

Software cursor

Support for emulated cursors was implemented for the D3D9 cursor API, which allows games to set an arbitrary image as the mouse cursor. This fixes an issue in Dungeon Siege 2 (#3020) and makes the cursor appear correctly in Act of War and various older D3D8 games. (PR #4302)

Sampler pool

Unreal Engine 3 games using D3D9 have a quirk in that they pass a seemingly uninitialized value as the mipmap LOD bias. In order to avoid creating more Vulkan sampler objects than the driver supports, previous versions of DXVK would round the LOD bias to a multiple of 0.5, which could introduce visual inaccuracies. As a more correct soluition, DXVK will now destroy unused Vulkan samplers on the fly and use the correct LOD bias.

Note: The aforementioned workaround was never needed or used in the D3D11 implementation, it only affected D3D9.

Bug fixes and Improvements

• On Nvidia driver version 565.57.01 and newer, strict float emulation is enabled by default for improved correctness. Games for which this option was already enabled may see a small performance uplift on this driver.
• Made various changes to potentially improve performace on certain mobile GPUs. (includes PR #4358)
• Display modes are now ordered by refresh rate to be more consistent with wined3d and fix issues with some games picking the wrong display mode.
• Fixed a large number of wine test failures.
• Ascension to the Throne: Fixed old regression that would cause parts of the ground to render black. (#4338, PR #4341)
• Command & Conquer: Generals: Fixed performance issue caused by a missing D3D8 entry point. (PR #4342)
• King's Bounty: Warriors of the North: Fixed water rendering issue. (#4344, PR #4350)
• Tomb Raider: Legend: Fixed flickering geometry with strict float emulation. (#4319, PR #4442)
• Rayman 3: Fixed a regression that caused rendering issues. (#4422, PR #4423)

D3D11 / DXGI

Resource management changes

In order to reduce system memory pressure and improve stability in 32-bit games, creating, uploading and discarding resources is now throttled if the amount of temporary staging memory allocations exceed a certain threshold. This fixes crashes in Total War: Rome II and a number of other games. Additionally, large DYNAMIC textures commonly used for video playback will no longer use a staging buffer.

The d3d11.maxDynamicImageBufferSize and d3d11.maxImplicitDiscardSize options were removed accordingly; affected games such as Total War: Warhammer III and Ryse: Son of Rome should now perform well by default, without excessive memory usage.

Note: These changes negatively affect CPU-bound performance in a number of games, including Shadow Warrior 2.

Bug fixes and Improvements

• SEQUENTIAL swap effects are now implemented for DXGI swap chains, which allows games to read previously presented backbuffers. This fixes an issue wherein savegame thumbnails would appear black in certain visual novels. (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/7017)
• Devirtualized some D3D11 method calls to improve compatibility with Special K.
• Fixed incorrect shader code generation for EvaluateAttributeSnapped.
• Lock contention is reduced in certain games that use Deferred Contexts for rendering. This may improve performance on older CPUs in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and some other games.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Campaign Remastered: Fixed a possible GPU hang. (#3884)
• Diablo 4: Work around an issue where the game does not start if an integrated GPU is exposed.
• The Sims 4: Work around a use-after-free bug in the game's D3D11 renderer for real this time. (#4360)
• Vindictus: Work around potential rendering issues caused by uninitialized constant buffer data. (#4405, #4406)
• Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami: Fixed a regression introduced in DXVK 2.4.1 that would cause these games to lock up on start. (PR #4297)

Miscellaneous changes

• An SDL3 backend was added for dxvk-native. (PR #4326, #4404)
• Fixed an issue introduced in DXVK 2.4.1 which would lead to error messages about failed buffer creation.
• Fixed a long-standing issue where overlapping occlusion queries would lead to incorrect Vulkan usage. (#2698)
• Fixed a rare issue wherein timestamp queries would not be tracked correctly and could read incorrect data.
• Fixed various other issues that led to Vulkan validation errors in games such as Dishonored 2, Tales of Arise and The Sims 4.
• Fixed various issues with MSVC builds. (PR #4444)
• Disabled a workaround for boken render target clears on Nvidia drivers prior to version 560.28.03 on unaffected drivers.
• If supported, VK_EXT_pageable_device_local_memory is now used to enable better driver-side memory management.

Hotfix:

• Revert DRI_PRIME auto-setting (broke too many non-standard setups)

• DXVK updated with dxvk.hideIntegratedGraphics = True for Diablo IV (https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/commit/125f0acefdb5c7e9422fc7b5afffc442d9cef34d) to resolve the grey screen issue on systems with AMD iGPU + dGPU.

-bump wine to latest bleeding edge

-bump dxvk to latest git

-bump vkd3d-proton to latest git (contains additional MH Wilds fix)

-bump dxvk-nvapi to latest git

-import upstream lsteamclient changes

-import upstream vrclient changes

-add xdefiant patch (thanks tperalta82)

-auto-apply DRI_PRIME=1 when more than one gpu is detected. This allows Diablo IV to get passed the grey screen on igpu+dgpu systems.

-add protonfixes for silent hill 3 video playback

-add protonfixes for Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered internet connection (thanks UsernamesAreNotMyThing)

I use sway in Wayland, and tend to keep games on a separate workspace.

In X11, with i3, I'd frequently switch away from the game and leave it running when something was loading or progression was required, and do something else while waiting. In Wayland, pretty much every game would suspend while viewing another workspace, which drove me bananas. I assumed that this was toggleable functionality, but couldn't find where the toggle was.

Today, I finally ran across an answer to this and wanted to highlight it for anyone else who dislikes this behavior. By default, if a window is not visible, rendering will block. Setting the vk_xwayland_wait_ready=false environment variable will disable this functionality.

Title. Just noticed that it has not been updated since a while. Also, what are the best alternatives to it?

Thanks in advance.

Hopefully this means these 13+ year old GPUs will still work with Wayland compositors that will eventually switch to Vulkan, beyond working with gaming and the like.

Navi 10: RX 5700, 5600
Navi 14: RX 5500, 5300

Hi guys!

I purchased a few months ago a new AMD PC, with a 7700 CPU, 32GB of RAM and a 7800XT GPU. I've noticed since, that my electric bill has been increased (compared to when I used an Intel i7 6700 with a 1070 GPU), I was wondering, is it possible to use a hybrid GPU setup kinda like laptops, where the iGPU from the CPU is activated for normal tasks, and the discrete GPU is only activated on demand? Would the GPU be unpowered/sleeping in the meantime?

....all this from a Linux perspective, I'm running Nobara 40.

Thanks!

On W*ndows I used DS4Wind*ws, and I have no issues with Steam, but how can I use it to play with RetoArch and Lutris?

Is DS4DRV the way?

Hi everyone,

I'm looking to buy a new gaming rig as my current machine feels like it's getting a bit dated. Been gaming on Linux for the past 6 months to a year. Ditched Windows around the time they announced ads and that recall bullshit.

What are your experiences with gfx cards and their drivers? I haven't bought AMD (gfx) in... Over 20 years. Online results show conflicting answers. Some swear by AMD, others say the drivers are unstable and they need to reboot when switching games. Other say never to update the drivers as long as stuff works.

Currently have an Nvidia 2080 super. Which has served me quite well. But newer games are starting to give it a hard time. Never really had any driver related issue.

I have a friend with an AMD gfx ( windows) and he's not super happy with it. Game/pc crashes related to it apparently. So I'm a bit on the fence about AMD.

I'm not sure what to look for in a cpu. I currently have an AMD. I guess more expensive is better and that's about it? Is there a noticeable benefit of the amd 9 vs AMD 7 series?

I'm not looking to overclock any of the hardware.

What's the standard regarding memory nowadays? I've got 16 in my current rig, and more can't hurt. I would never go under 16. Was looking at 32 but I've seen PCs with 64 and wondered if that is just overkill or not.

I've mainly games on nobara, but recently switched to bazzite as I've been meaning to give that a go. I didn't really have any complaints om nobara.

Side note: my monitor supports Nvidia whatsitcalled, but not free sync I think.

Been daily driving Bazzite for almost half a year now. I currently have two seperate 2TB SSD’s, one with Windows 11 and the other has Bazzite. Bought a 1TB SSD so I can migrate my Windows install to a smaller SSD since I much prefer Linux now.

Just need to stop being lazy and finish migrating everything I care about off my old Windows install onto my new 1TB Windows install, then I plan to install CachyOS onto the soon to be free’d up 2TB SSD, since I’m curious about Arch Linux. I’ll always have Bazzite to fall back on if need be, or god forbid, Windows.