I’m finding that my Framework 16 barely holds its own against some older games on high settings, like Just Cause 3. I had to turn down the resolution to get a snappy framerate. It even got a bit choppy in a Half Life 2 level!
Is anyone planning a better graphics card for this? How hard would it be to make one? I would imagine cooling, PCIe signaling, and GDDR signaling to be some of the top challenges.
Do you have the dedicated GPU? If not, does this look similar to your performance? (Compare with the 780M)
Very hard.
Yes, I have the dGPU. I’ve checked that it is active in games. It’s also pretty apparent when it’s active since it gets quite hot. When the integrated graphics are active, the heat is centered under the keyboard instead of at the back.
I feel like there is something wrong if you are getting choppy framerates in Half-Life 2. That’s a 20 year old game. I’m pretty sure I played it with perfect framerates on a laptop with a mediocre dedicated graphics card like 10-12 years ago.
I’ve noticed the Vulkan transpiler seems to be less efficient at very old games. I suspect this is just due to suboptimal code and maybe a piorly optimized level.
Did you install the drivers from framework or AMD?
I got much better results with the AMD ones.
I think I may have also explicitly installed ‘amdgpu’-- the open-source driver. So, are you saying the proprietary driver works better?
I’ve been gaming on the 780m (finally decided to buy the dGPU a couple days ago) and this is not the experience I’ve had. While I have HL2 installed, I haven’t played it much but I would expect it to run smooth as butter. I’ve been playing Overwatch, WoW, Baldurs Gate 3, and etc. without much issue on the integrated graphics. Not maxed out, naturally, but medium settings and getting 60-120 fps.
Are you sure there isn’t some other issue going on?
This is going to sound stupid, but disable fast boot. This cleared up numerous CPU performance issues for me.
Is this in Linux? If so try enabling vsync in the game. For me on KDE Wayland I’ve had to enable vsync or else whenever I move my mouse things get really choppy.
Arch Linux on Hyprland. The main issue for me might have been heat on that Halflife 2 session. It was sitting on plush cushions and the choppy scene happened while the keyboard was uncomfortably hot. I break thibgs a lot though, so as long as I can fix it when I drop it or spill something, I’ll take a bit of excess heat.
Just Cause 2 on highest settings seems to actually be choppy pretty much immediately at full resolution, but theres usually a period of reasonable performance until the system (quickly) heats up.
All that said, amdgpu_top shows 50-70C max.
Do folks think this isnt a performance-per-watt issue that could be mitigated with newer silicon?
What kind of average framerate are you getting in Half-Life? I haven’t played it in over a decade, but it was only $1.99, so I downloaded it and played for an hour or so this evening. Native resolution, all settings maxed out, set to sync with display refresh rate. It was rock solid at 165FPS with nary a hitch. As would kind of be expected for a 20 year old game that I don’t think took beastly hardware to run, even when it released (assuming I’m remembering that correctly). Granted, this was on Windows, not Linux.
Either way, it’s certainly not an issue with the raw power of the GPU or CPU.