Solus Budgie performing worse than KDE in gaming

JacobM33

I made a post about this on the r/SolusProject reddit a few days ago and didn't receive any conclusive answer on why Budgie performs worse than KDE for me in games. Said post can be found here.. This post here will be mostly a copy-paste of that one, with several changes based on more current observations.

So I have recently switched to linux several months ago where I moved over from windows full-time to arch. I have had a good time there, but am very interested in Solus. After hearing about the 4.1 release, I decided to give it a go. Lo and behold, all the versions I have tried are extremely snappy and quick. I don't think I have ever used another linux distribution this speedy out of the box before.

On the other hand, when I try to run steam games such as Factorio and Rimworld in steam on Solus Budgie I experience some lag where my framerate varies between 30 and 60 FPS in both games. I assume this is somehow down to CPU-bound issues in Budgie because I don't see any noticeable difference in more GPU-bound games such as No Man's Sky.

I did not experience these issues on arch KDE or Solus KDE, so I believe it is a budgie issue from what I can tell.

I do not experience this issue on arch gnome. When I tried to install Solus Gnome, I was unable to boot into a GUI post-installation even after making sure that Wayland was disabled in /etc/gdm/custom.conf as well as installing drivers from CLI (nvidia proprietary ones). So at the moment I am unable to determine whether this is an issue of Solus' implementation of Gnome (in Gnome and Budgie) or if it is just a budgie issue.

I have done some research into these issues, and the only point of reference I was able to find is a setting in the budgie settings called "Disable unredirection of windows". The option reads: "This option is for advanced users. Use this if you are having graphical or performance issues with dedicated GPUs." Intrigued, I turned this on... and it makes no difference.

So from the information I have, I am sure that the issue is related to budgie (possibly gnome since budgie is based on it, though I can't be sure at the moment since I am unable to test Gnome).

Before anyone asks, I do have my proprietary nvidia graphics drivers installed and I am up to date as far as eopkg is concerned.

This issue also occurs on a completely fresh installation of Solus Budgie where all I have done is: install proprietary nvidia drivers from doflicky (including 32bit), install steam, install the games I need to test, and run them. I have not messed around with any config files or anything else. I mention this because someone asked in the reddit thread whether I had messed with CPU governor or similar. I haven't.

My PC specs:

CPU: i5 9600k

GPU: GTX 1080

RAM: 32GB corsair

Motherboard: MSI Z390

Storage: 2TB SATA SSD

I would really like to give budgie a fair shot if at all possible, since it is an awesome desktop environment. Does anyone know what I can do about this?

brent

budgie isn't based on gnome.
I know this has nothing to do with your problem, sorry.

JacobM33

brent Sorry, I think I worded myself incorrectly in the initial post. I know at a time Budgie was a fork of gnome, but now it is independent. Would it be more accurate to say it heavily makes use of gnome technologies such as GTK and Gnome Stack?

DataDrake

JacobM33 Budgie has never been a fork of GNOME, but yes it does use GTK and GNOME Control Center

brent

JacobM33 It's all good. Common misconception.

JacobM33

DataDrake Ah ok sorry. I must have been misinformed at some point.

Getta91

Have you tried disabling compositing?

JacobM33

Getta91 Apologies if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell you can't disable compositing with Mutter. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If you're referring to the "Disable unredirection for windows" in budgie settings, I have tried that already, as mentioned in the original post.

Getta91

JacobM33 well you are right

buwi0ng2020

just a benchmark using phoronix test suite, done recently. 2 different distros w/ 2 different DEs. Not exactly apples to apples comparison but results are almost negligible in real time, I guess. HTH

Deepin DE:

Budgie DE

JacobM33

As far as I can tell, bumping my own thread is not against the rules. I'd really like some help with this problem if anyone's willing to spare some time to assist me.

brent

Not a gamer and not a tech person. Just a forum observer. If I type 'fps gaming' into the search bar I see some SOLVEd threads that resemble your nvidia dilemma.
Your dilemma, you said, was some steam games dragged in fps rate, and most did not. Maybe peeps are waiting for some trial and error and troubleshooting on your part since there seems to be so many variables to your problem.
I am sincere and not facetious: when I first joined, with roadbumps, it took me a while to realize the more investment I gave my problem, the more investment I got back.
What have you tried? (edit🙂 maybe the board can whittle it down---)

Getta91

brent well I just migrate trop Budgie to KDE and yeah I am also getting a framerates boost (+15 fps).

DataDrake

Sorry, I've not had much time to respond to most threads. This will basically be down to kwin being faster that budgie-wm. I can't say for certain, but I would expect similar results on GNOME since it also uses mutter.

JacobM33

Update to this post:

I have conducted some testing with various desktop environments on Solus and Arch (my two most used distros) to try and gain a better understanding of this issue. Here is my testing and its results:

The most important thing I was able to learn was that this issue I am experiencing is an issue of Solus' implementation of Budgie rather than a Budgie issue in itself. I can be fairly sure of this because I made a clean installation of ArchLinux with Budgie and Lightdm configured the same way Solus has it. With this setup, I have framerates exactly the same as I do on Solus KDE and basically any other linux distribtution from my testing. Through this, I can be fairly sure it's an issue with Solus itself and its integration with budgie rather than purely a Budgie issue.
[IMPORTANT POINT: I was unable to test Solus Gnome because I can't boot it once I've installed it.] Due to Budgie making use of some of the gnome technologies, people have suggested in the comments of this post that it could be an issue of Gnome just handling games less well than Plasma. I was initially in agreement, but after thoroughly testing Arch Gnome I can confidently say that the performance is indistinguishable from Arch KDE and Solus KDE.
I've had a play around with Solus' "linux steam integration" settings panel, and from toggling the various different ones none of them made a difference.
As mentioned in the original post, I did also try the setting in budgie settings called "disable unredirection of windows". And this made no difference.
The only thing that was able to help my framerates somewhat in Solus Budgie was to to tick the "Force Composition Pipeline" setting in Nvidia X Server Settings. This partially helps my framerates in CPU-bound games like I mentioned in the original post. The only issue with this is that I gain significant latency with my mouse input to the point where it's borderline unusable.

To conclude: the issue appears to be something related to Solus Budgie specifically rather than Budgie as a desktop environment and it's underlying window manager, due to the fact that I did not experience this issue in arch at all. Once again, any advice pertaining to this issue would be greatly appreciated so I can finally get to the bottom of this issue and fully migrate to Solus Budgie.

DataDrake

JacobM33 The most important thing I was able to learn was that this issue I am experiencing is an issue of Solus' implementation of Budgie rather than a Budgie issue in itself. I can be fairly sure of this because I made a clean installation of ArchLinux with Budgie and Lightdm configured the same way Solus has it. With this setup, I have framerates exactly the same as I do on Solus KDE and basically any other linux distribtution from my testing. Through this, I can be fairly sure it's an issue with Solus itself and its integration with budgie rather than purely a Budgie issue.

Actually, if it's an identical configuration of Budgie and Lightdm and you see a different behavior, then it has nothing to do with Budgie or Lightdm. It will be somewhere lower in the stack.

sgvd

JacobM33
Is the Solus Gnome issue solvable by adding the boot entry manually after installation? For me it's common to have to do this after a Solus install, regardless of DE.

JacobM33

DataDrake Actually, if it's an identical configuration of Budgie and Lightdm and you see a different behavior, then it has nothing to do with Budgie or Lightdm. It will be somewhere lower in the stack.

You're most likely correct, as you seem to know significantly more about this than I do. I did try to make them as close as I could, but I can't be 100% sure.

DataDrake

JacobM33 Could be down to GTK/Mesa/Xorg. Most of the time it's a seemingly unrelated piece that's actually to blame.

ghostv33

On steam, for the game right click the name and go to properties and set -threads [max number of threads ur cpu has]
its not a problem with budgie its a problem common with linux steam.
For some reason games like csgo doesn't pick up all the threads ur cpu has
You can see a lot of topics related to this over the internet
You have manually to tell the game to use all threads