Are you running TLD on linux/Radeon?

[stratvox]

Hi folks!

@jeffpeng and I have been hashing out video card issues in the tech forum, and I thought I'd ask here if there are any linux players playing this game with an AMD/ATI Radeon card.

We both have nVidia and are experiencing some ... "issues" ... and I'm curious to find out if anyone out there is on linux and radeon to see if those issues exist with those drivers.

We're both looking forward to the next gen Navi cards, and we're very curious to find out what the state of the art is right now with Radeon and linux and OpenGL/Vulkan.

Thanks!

 

[Guest jeffpeng]

Yes, this would indeed be very interesting to know!

[Guest kristaok]

Win10 - Nvidia 

[Guest jeffpeng]

20 minutes ago, kristaok said:

Win10 - Nvidia 

I fail to see how this relates to Linux and Radeon. But maybe that's just my ignorant self talking.

[Guest kristaok]

1 minute ago, jeffpeng said:

I fail to see how this relates to Linux and Radeon. But maybe that's just my ignorant self talking.

I was just saying basically no, I don't use Linux or Radeon. So I can't really help, that's literally all I was trying to say. 

The Topic was asking "are you running Linux / Radeon" that's why I put what I put. 

Edited June 1, 2019 by kristaok

[Guest jeffpeng]

Just now, kristaok said:

I was just saying basically no, I don't use Linux or Radeon. So I can't really help, that's literally all I was trying to say. 

Ah!

[Guest kristaok]

8 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Ah!

Sorry for the misunderstanding  

[stratvox]

@jeffpeng I've been doing some playing around. The 396 drivers with -force-vulkan result in no z-fighting, and instead of shadows being all messed up they are simply gone, and may be a good way for you to avoid the headaches you get from the non-stop flickering with the newer drivers.

ETA: ...scratch the no shadows, that was an artefact of the weather conditions.

That said, the input delay is still there. Which is certainly less than 100% awesome.

Hopefully we'll get some real relief soon.

Unity has announced they are now going to officially support Unity Studio on linux.

In the meantime if anyone has any experience with using AMD and TLD on linux we'd both love to hear from you.

Edited June 2, 2019 by stratvox

[Guest jeffpeng]

23 hours ago, stratvox said:

In the meantime if anyone has any experience with using AMD and TLD on linux we'd both love to hear from you.

I've got a feeling I'll be answering this thread myself in a few weeks.

[stratvox]

Yeah, I'm thinking I may be doing the same thing.

Pact: whichever one of us gets to it first, we'll report here!

[Guest jeffpeng]

1 hour ago, stratvox said:

Pact: whichever one of us gets to it first, we'll report here!

Sealed.

[stratvox]

I know this is kind of necroing the thread, but I figured I'd put an update in here. I'm not running a Radeon 5700 XT under linux. Nice card, but it didn't solve the issue. I now think it's a Unity issue, and I'm very much hoping that the Ep 3 update in October will fix it.

I haven't really been playing the game because of it, and I'm really looking forward to checking out Wintermute when Ep 3 lands, assuming that the z-fighting glitches are fixed.

How're things with you @jeffpeng?

[Guest jeffpeng]

You kinda mentioned in another thread that it didn't reall help, so I forgot this one. I've settled for a (much better supported since ancient) RX570 (not 5700 ^^) and had the same result. It did help with issues in other games I run via Wine/Proton, but not with TLD. A bit sad, I must admit, but for now I'll stick with my windoze partition for gaming. Seems I was premature in blaming nVidia for this one - but in 9 out of 10 times it's not wrong to blame nVidia when something goes wrong with graphics under Linux.

Something I thought of recently: It's think it's not really Z-Fighting we're seeing. I think what actually happens is that the renderer cannot decide if it wants to render the high-poly close up version of the terrain, or the low-poly distant version. That this doesn't happen in Vulkan is indicative that the problem lies deeper than the game itself, but it might very well be Unity that fudged up this one. Yes, let's hope for Ep 3 bringing an updated Unity.

A bit off topic: One might thrown upon buying a 570 this late into the lifecycle of the card, but I'm a notorious lowfi gamer that's really happy with 1080p and 60hz and of the games I play TLD is already the fastest paced one. And Polaris has really good support under Linux, and since this machine dubs as my Workstation as well I need it to be stable and reliable first, and fast second. Heck, I even considered a WX5100. I think Navi will reach Polaris/Vega level support in Linux not before the Workstation cards are out for it.

[stratvox]

Yeah, I dunno. According to Phoronix, the updates are flying fast and furious into linux for the 5700XT. It looks to me like they're trying to get the Navi stuff really up to speed because there are at minimum two more parts coming (Navi 12 & 14) and I suspect their plan is to have Navi fully supported by the time they come out in October/November.

I'm considering moving off 18.04LTS up to 19.04 so I can grab the 5.3 kernel and updated mesa etc from the oibaf ppa and take a look at the state of the art with the open source linux drivers rather than with the stack you can download from AMD now.

It'll be a boat load of work, though; I've heavily customised by linux setup and have a TON of third party repos; getting all that stuff back up to snuff will be... challenging... and tedious.

[stratvox]

Hey @jeffpeng I pulled the trigger on going with the open source drivers; upgraded to 19.04, installed the mainline kernel tool, the graphics-drivers ppa for the latest'n'greatest mesa stuff, and uninstalled the closed drivers that I installed from AMD.

Performance in the game is significantly better with the open source drivers than the proprietary ones. The flickering is still there, unfortunately. If the Oct 22 update fixes that problem I'm very much looking forward to spending a lot more time on Great Bear.

[Guest jeffpeng]

Well I've been running open AMDGPU since I migrated to the rx 570. But I'm running a source based distribution, that makes it far easier to include bleeding edge stuff. But good to hear Navi is going places under linux. 🙂Addemdum: Yeah I really hope 10/22 fixes that stuff. I guess by now it's clear it's game/engine related. Still not feeling sorry for blaming nVidia.  

Edited October 10, 2019 by jeffpeng

[stratvox]

4 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

Still not feeling sorry for blaming nVidia.

[Guest jeffpeng]

So @stratvox, @LkP and the maybe other one and a half linux gamers out there. A little update on this since I finally found some time to look into it again ....

I can report that TLD (64 bit Version, Linux native) works fine and without terrain wobble and without input lag with the following configuration using Vulkan (-force-vulkan) on both an RX 570 and an R9 390 (CPU is a fairly middle-of-the-road R5 2600).

Update: Yeah, that was premature. Some bigger leafed forests (funnily enough not all of them) glitch out with shadow flickers. Maybe it has to do with the amount of shadows drawn, no idea. So yeah, TLD under Linux is still broken. I'll still leave the rest of the post here for reference.

Update 2: I'll see if I can build AMDVLK later or if Mesa 19.3 might resolve the issue. There are several reports of similar Z-Buffer issues with radv among other games. Although on second thought I feel this probably is a fault of the Unity shader compiler. 

• Kernel: 5.3.8
• DRM: openAMDGPU 
• Mesa: 19.1.7
• Vulkan implementation: radv (from Mesa, I didn't have time to try AMDVLK since I would actually have to build a package for that to not mess up my system ...)
• Vulkan-Loader: 1.1.14
• LLVM:8.0.1
• XOrg:1.20.5 on Wayland

Some things to note:

• Update: Terribly broken shadows in some forested areas
• Again: No Terrain wobble.
• Input lag is fine, the game is as responsive as it gets.
• Shadows and lighting in general is fine. Definitely more accurate than it used to be since Redux with the lackluster GL4.2 fix
• CPU usage feels uncannily high with one thread parking at 100% even when the game is not focussed. If that is a problem with Vulkan or with TLD/Unity I cannot say.
• SSAO feels blurrier than it should be at high, but no idea if that is a recent change to the game (I usually just play SSAO low) or a Vulkan problem.
• The disclaimer screen actually works with vulkan (with GL it's a hot mess)
• The old bug that the mouse isn't centered on radial/interaction persists and I am rather certain cannot be fixed without implementing a softmouse in TLD (no idea if Unity can even do that)

Edited November 5, 2019 by jeffpeng

[Guest jeffpeng]

Alright. Patched in AMDVLK rather hastily but I must say ..... it ain't ready yet. Not only does it not fix the shadow issue, it actually garbles up some shaders, and not only in TLD. Clearly needs some more work.

Then I went ahead and built Mesa 20 from the development tree, and it didn't fix the shadow issue either. Actually I found some information on that, and apparently it's a longer standing Unity issue with Vulkan that is said to be resolved in Unity 2019.2 I also gave GL another shot with the truly latest and greatest stuff, all the versions from 3.2 to 4.5, but the result was terrain wobble - as expected.

I think at this point it's rather obvious it's an issue with either Unity or TLD, but my bet is on Unity. 

Edited November 5, 2019 by jeffpeng

[stratvox]

Yeah, I'm pretty convinced it's Unity too. Currently I'm playing the windows version using proton; it's a much better experience. I hope that Unity manages to get it together and that Raph and Hinterland manage to get themselves onto a non-broken version of unity soon. The proton-dxvk-windows version runs well, but my experience so far is that performance overall is better with the native linux client... plus I don't have to go spelunking deep into a wine tree to find the screenshots I've taken while playing.

[stratvox]

I've generally found that as of about two or three weeks ago, the open source radeon stuff surpassed the AMD drivers at least when it comes to my 5700xt. 

It's a seriously impressive card. Fun facts... it's actually better to lock the framerate to my output device for pretty much any game I play because the card is so fast that it's updating frames several times every sixtieth of a second!

[LkP]

16 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

CPU usage feels uncannily high with one thread parking at 100% even when the game is not focussed. If that is a problem with Vulkan or with TLD/Unity I cannot say.

just on that, I've noticed a higher CPU usage since the update

 

9 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

I think at this point it's rather obvious it's an issue with either Unity or TLD, but my bet is on Unity. 

would be worth trying with another game (if/when I have time)

 

Anyway, TLD is playable as it is. I'm lucky or blind enough to not be so uncomfortable with the z-fighting.

[Asinine]

Hello, I'm here because I made the final swap about 6 weeks ago (to Linux). I upgraded my cpu to AMD from Intel, but I'm still running my Nvidia 1070 on proprietary drivers (which won't allow me to run dual monitors on my dual non-similar Nvidia GPUs. The other is a 960 if that matters). Need proprietary otherwise I can't even run TLD on lowest without a framerate around 15-20 fps.

I'm running Manjaro. If you'd like my stats, let me know.

But my issue is not high CPU usage, but that randomly my survival game just decides to lag down to about 1-2 fps. I can fix it by quitting out then just restarting survival mode, so I don't even have to exit the game. So I've been trying to sleep at the worst opportune times to mitigate the lag, or just give up and quit out to load the last one, depending on the danger of the area I'm in. It originally triggered by me editing my journal, then checking my inventory, but lately it is just happening at the most random spots. Now every time the game lags slightly, I assume I'm about to drop down into "can't play" mode, though sometimes I luck out and only am going downhill and sprain half of my appendages and the lag is from the save (it's definitely made me happier about the spraining mechanism!).

Even when I do try to sleep when the lag hits, dropping a bedroll usually takes 3-5 seconds, and sleeping only an hour (which I feel often takes longer than choosing 6 or 12 hours, but that's probably me. I suspect they're all the same time lengths) takes about 10-20 seconds.

I'd quit playing in February, but restarted when I made the swap to Linux in early September, but I never encountered any issue until Ep 3 came out -- well, until I went back to survival after I didn't finish Ep 3 because it irked me. So I think it came out on a Tuesday, and about a week went by and I was finished with it and went back to survival. And I played at least a few days then suddenly the lag showed up. I had no instances of this weird, random lag before Ep 3.

I opted for the 4DON and only played that 2+ hours each of the 4 days, during which I never experienced this issue (and day 1 I played about 5 hours because I couldn't find a hatchet and scoured the entire CH before giving up). But came back to survival, and lag started back up. I think I'll start making a log of how often I crash when I have time to play again.

I posted on Reddit, but the consensus there was folks had similar Linux-based issues, but not like mine. So I dunno...

(Currently looking into recording options to have some video to show what I'm talking about.)

Edit: Sorry that post was windy, but I have noticed each of my individual CPUs being near 100%, but they seem to be cycling normally, and I don't see any issues with it in this game. When I experience my problem I originally posted about, there isn't anything abnormal going on with the CPU that isn't going on when the game runs fine and dandy.

Edited November 6, 2019 by Asinine

[Guest jeffpeng]

13 hours ago, stratvox said:

The proton-dxvk-windows version runs well, but my experience so far is that performance overall is better with the native linux client

I'm running a VK3D enabled, patched up Wine-Staging homebrew that is "technically" proton equivalent - but has the upside of actually running code for my CPU, not a CPU from 12 years ago, which indeed does make a difference considering the amount of API translation wine has to juggle.

13 hours ago, stratvox said:

open source radeon stuff surpassed the AMD drivers at least when it comes to my 5700xt

The open source drivers are basically always-bleeding-edge, whereas the "official" drivers are more conservative and usually lag a few generations behind. Since they are mostly to be used for computation focussed tasks on AMD Vega cards Navi really isn't much more than an afterthought there. But I am so far also impressed with openAMDGPU. Stuff just works, most notably everything that used to be flaky with the prop unVidia driver was instantly resolved, including KMS, modesetting, DRI3 and Wayland/EGL.

12 hours ago, LkP said:

would be worth trying with another game (if/when I have time)

That would be indeed intersting. However there are many different Versions out there, and upgrading Unity is a pretty huge effort for a developer. Not sure what Version TLD is running, maybe @Admincan elude on that a bit.

@AsinineAre you playing the native Linux version or on Proton/wine? If so .... 32bit or 64bit? Do you experience what I call "Terrain wobble"? What are your launch options? Kernel Version? Mesa Version? LLVM version? unVidia-Driver version? So many questions! Much appreciated if you could answer some of them!

As for your issue: it would be interesting to see if some other threads (possible kernel threads) are locking up. Also I've experienced similar issues way back with XFCE 4.12's windows compositor playing minecraft when running using transparencies, which are basically done on the GPU. Took me ages to make that connection. However your's sounds more like a CPU/interrupt related thing. You got any fancy stuff in dmesg?

 

[LkP]

4 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

Not sure what Version TLD is running

~/.config/unity3d/Hinterland/TheLongDark/Player.log

Quote

Initialize engine version: 2018.4.4f1