Low power draw in games with AMD GPU

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1

Hi,

I recently upgraded from an nVidia Quadro M2000 to an AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, I did not reinstall Fedora if that helps. Performance has been great however, as of today? (just noticed it, may have been happening for a few days have kept system up to date) maybe earlier the Vega 56 seems to sit around 10-60W power usage (GPU utilisation is around 70-80%) with poor performance when playing Beyond All Reason (flatpak).

I get similar power draw in games on Steam (installed through RPMFusion) so I don’t think it is flatpak related. I ran FurMark 2 which consumes max power (165W) so I don’t think it’s related to the graphics card. I’ve also attempted allowing overclocking through LACT and trying to force the highest stock clock speed (1509MHz) which did not help at all (given, I also don’t know much about overclocking). But I didn’t have overclocking enabled previously, only enabled to try and fix this issue.

So I’m not sure where to go from here in terms of troubleshooting or fixes and was wondering if anyone had any ideas. I’m pretty sure BAR uses OpenGL and Furmark worked fine with Vulkan and OpenGL.

Thanks,

2

As an update I attempted using the oldest kernel in the GRUB menu on my system (6.7.6-200.fc39.x86_64) which unfortunately has not solved the issue.

3

I see from Phronix there are power improvements going into amdgpu drivers.

You might want to try the 6.8 kernel and see if that improves matters.

There are instructions as part of test day here [Fedora Test Days] Kernel 6.8 on how to get the test kernel.

I’m running that kernel at the moment and not see any issues.

4

Thanks for your suggestion I gave it a go but it unfortunately didn’t fix it. I might try a reinstall next week when I’ve got more time.

5

I have a USB-3 SSD that I use for testing new Fedora version.
That way I do not have to reinstall to do big change experiments.

I am using 500GiB samsung T7 drive.

6

Yeah I was thinking of trying Silverblue anyway so I can easily roll back in case things like this happen in the future. But hopefully it is just a configuration issue

7

Not sure if you have been able to resolve your issue or not yet.

However, there is an open bug for what sounds very much like your issue (targeted at Radeon 7000 series GPUs, however).

It might be worth checking if the rawhide kernel presents the same issue?

Also, might verify if the mesa packages are installed? I am using an AMD card for the first time so I dont know how Fedora handles getting all the AMD drivers - esp if you did a gpu swap.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2274069

8

Thanks, I ended up doing a fresh install of Silverblue 39, I haven’t been able to test it extensively however, BAR was getting around 50-60W which is better than before (~20W) and BAR isn’t very resource intensive. I’ll try Age of Empires III Definitive Edition again at some point when I get the chance. Thanks for following up

Edit: Looks like it’s still not working on Silverblue 39, using mission center I get this when running the BAR benchmark:

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9

Another update: Recently upgraded to kernel 6.8.5-201.fc39.x86_64. Unfortunately it didn’t fix BAR (Flatpak or AppImage), however Age Of Empires III DE and Age Of Empires IV through steam in a Fedora 39 distrobox seemed to work fine. So I suppose the issue is partially fixed. Thanks to everyone who has helped

10

Reading the mission center page, it seems that gpu support is experimental.

Can you install nvtop and run it from the terminal when testing your games?

11

Just downloaded mission center (it does look kinda cool). But very quickly found a descrepancy against btop which is my go-to for cpu monitoring:

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Even letting it cycle through the threads, btop showed a high of 2.4g ghz (makes sense I wasnt doing anything). But Mission center showed ~4.6

12

I don’t know anything about mission center, but I have to wonder if it may be reporting the peak cpu freq while btop is reporting an average. I have seen various apps that show the spread of freqs across the processor with different values for the various cores.

I also see that btop fluctuates on the freq as load varies. It bounces between 2.2 and 4.8 GHz on my system. Each sample of freq is only an instantaneous snapshot.

13

nvtop reported the same values so Mission Center is good! Playing BAR now I think it’s alright perhaps I wasn’t getting the high GPU power draw earlier as I was using the benchmark which is likely to be more CPU bound and mine has a max clock of 3.20 GHz (Xeon E5-2620 v3) so probably a bottleneck thing. Thanks for your help! I will mark the reply with the bug report as the solution since it fixed everything else.