this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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glxinfo | grep Vendor
Vendor: Mesa (0xffffffff)glxinfo | grep Device
Device: llvmpipe (LLVM 17.0.6, 256 bits) (0xffffffff)glxinfo | grep "OpenGL rend"
OpenGL renderer string: llvmpipe (LLVM 17.0.6, 256 bits)Let me know if that's not right. glxinfo dumps a lot of text but those are the only hits for your comment.
When I launch radeontop it prints this before launching, and then the output suggests it isn't working:
Unknown Radeon card. <= R500 won't work, new cards might.
All stats sit at 0.00% except for Memory Clock @ 9%.
EDIT:
xorg, not wayland
Yeah, so it's not using hardware acceleration then -- your (poor) CPU has been trying to do all this in software emulation. I updated my comment above -- take a look in Xorg.0.log if you're on Xorg. My first guess is that you most-likely need newer drivers.
I know that these are new enough for the 7900 XTX; that's current for Debian trixie, just to provide a known-good point in terms of driver version.
EDIT: You don't say what distro you're using. If you're using Debian stable -- I think I was when I first got my 7900 XTX, and IIRC they didn't have driver support in at that point, though that was a while back now -- you might check whether you have the backports repository present.
EDIT2: The first results for my search as to minimum supported version, though I wouldn't take this as authoritative:
https://old.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1301rph/radeon_7900_support/
EDIT3: Sorry, you did say which OS you were using -- PopOS.
dpkg -l|grep radeon
I don't know exactly what i'm looking for in the xorg logs... cat /var/log/Xorg.*.log | grep "EE"
cat /var/log/Xorg.*.log | grep "WW"
cat /var/log/Xorg.*.log | grep "gpu"
sudo journalctl -kb | grep gpu
uname -r
I think this is the mesa version?
cat /etc/os-release
Those are the kernel and Mesa versions, and at least assuming that the thing I linked above is correct as to minimum versions, you should be okay as to versions of those.
And if this is the out-of-box preinstalled OS from System76, I'd think that it'd be set up out of box for hardware acceleration. Hmm.
Yep, you're using software rendering and your extremely fast GPU is sitting there idle. Talk to System76 about enabling the correct driver.
(That was obvious from the initial "0-10 FPS in KSP" symptom, of course -- even my 7-year-old AMD GPU, a Vega 56, can run that game just fine, and I'm pretty sure the AMD GPU I had before that could too.)
vulkan-tools | grep "GPU id":
cat /var/log/Xorg.*.log | grep amd
cat /var/log/Xorg.*.log | grep gpu
Make sure that you actually have permission to that /dev/dri/card1 device. This may be arranged by udev or "video" group membership.
Regarding AMD vs Nvidia, unless you need CUDA you probably made the right choice. This sounds like a config issue and you'd probably be dealing with the same thing with Nvidia too.
Yeah I'm pleasantly surprised by the unanimous responses that AMD seems to be the way to go in this space. At this point I know it's not using my GPU at all, so you are right that nvidia wouldn't be any different
That may mean that you have accelerated graphics via Vulkan. I'm familiar with
glxinfo's output, and I'm pretty sure that the fact that it's not listing your GPU means that OpenGL apps won't have hardware acceleration, but not sure whatvulkaninfodoes if it has no hardware acceleration available -- I'm not certain that having the GPU listed there means that it has 3D acceleration, or whether it can list something running via software emulation.Hmm. This may take a bit of feeling about, as a bit of this is new territory for me too.
When you run
vkcube-- which uses Vulkan -- it'll show a spinning cube and print a single line of text about the GPU used. What does it show for you?EDIT: Okay, apparently vkcube doesn't do what Vulkan apps are supposed to do by default -- it tries to pick a discrete GPU, so it's probably not the best sanity test for "what is a Vulkan-using program trying to render to".
I'm going to assume that the fact that
vulkaninfocan see the GPU means that it's accelerated, though. If that's true:You probably have 3D acceleration at the kernel and Xorg levels.
Kerbal Space Program has a Linux-native binary (on Steam, this shows up as that SteamOS icon), so it's probably not going through Proton's DirectX emulation, and from there to Vulkan, which it would if it only had a Windows binary. It looks like it has both an OpenGL and a DirectX rendering path on Windows. Typically games like this with a Linux-native release use the OpenGL path on Linux. kagis At least as of 2021, it looks like it was indeed using only OpenGL on Linux. So if you don't have accelerated OpenGL, then it's presumably not going to be accelerated.
I don't think that
glxinfoshould be showing "llvmpipe". I'm pretty sure that that means that you don't have accelerated OpenGL available.Take this with a grain of salt -- I've not run into an actual system where Vulkan-using games are accelerated, and OpenGL games are not. This is a guess. But it'd at least vaguely fit my understanding of what you've provided. I'm fuzzy on the relationship between Vulkan, OpenGL, and Mesa -- I don't know what exactly it might take to create issues for OpenGL but not Vulkan.
Okay, after some poking around, I did find at least one mechanism that could possibly cause OpenGL to not be accelerated but Vulkan to be accelerated:
https://superuser.com/questions/106056/force-software-based-opengl-rendering-on-ubuntu
I also confirmed that it produces the output that you're seeing on my system -- with that set,
glxinforeturns llvmpipe, even thoughvulkaninfohas GPU id 0 being the Radeon card. So if you've got that environment variable set somewhere, that could produce the behavior you're seeing.@zamithal@programming.dev, I don't know how you could have gotten that set, but in whatever terminal you were running
glxinfoandvulkaninfo, can you runset|strings|grep LIBGLand see if maybe that's set? If it is, maybeunset LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWAREand then from that terminal startsteamagain and see if Kerbal Space Program runs fine then?It doesn't appear to be set and additionally I don't appear to have the
libgl1-mesa-swx11package mentioned in that post.set|strings|grep LIBGL
apt list | grep libgl1-mesa
This does remind me that while developing a webgl canvas based javascript app the other day I was forced to go into firefox's about:config and set webgl.force-enabled = true. I should have dug deeper on that.
Ah, okay. Bit of a long shot.
You shouldn't need it -- that's for software rendering.
You might want libgl1-mesa-glx, but it sounds from that page like that was restructured prior to your distro release.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1517352/issues-installing-libgl1-mesa-glx
Both libgl1:amd64 and libglx-mesa-0:amd64 are installed on my system. Are they installed on yours? If not, if they are available in your apt repo, maybe do so and see if your problems disappear?