[BUG] [PSA] : GPU bug causes crashes on KDE Plasma

Hey all,
I’ve been experiencing crashes due to a mesa driver bug on the 7700S. After reaching out to both KDE and mesa, I have gotten a workaround that seems to do the trick. This only occurs if a monitor is plugged in via the USB-C DP alt-mode port on the back of the GPU.

I’ve submitted a bug report with KDE-plasma: 492830 – Fullscreen Games Not Displaying Properly
And they directed me to an existing mesa bug: Atomic Commit Failed when Gaming (#2075) · Issues · drm / amd · GitLab

Here are my symptoms:

  • extremely low fps or laggy mouse
  • the visuals will “freeze”, but trying to record the issue with OBS will not actually record the issue. OBS simply sees what I’m supposed to be seeing imgur video
  • some games (in my case, Timberborn specifically) will actually cause KDE plasma to hang completely. This is because the GPU driver resets, and KDE fails to handle the bug properly

The (temporary/workaround) solutions that I’ve found:

use gamescope. This works around the issue by bypassing the kwin compositor
As of right now, this will make the Steam overlay not work due to an an open Steam bug [1], and mangohud will not work properly [2]

turn off the Steam Overlay. I haven’t tested this more than a couple of times, but this seems to work. I don’t know if the steam overlay is actually triggering the bug somehow or what.

add KWIN_DRM_NO_DIRECT_SCANOUT=1 to /etc/environment. This is a workaround that AMD-mesa has specifically reported to work. KDE/plasma told me that this would cause a performance hit, but I have not (yet) noticed anything different.


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