Hi everyone !

Neon user since the beginning here. It really is the distro I've been looking forward to for 10 years... Thanks devs !

I have a strange issue though.

I used to use it on a quite slow PC (an i5 laptop with intel HD graphics 3000 that was 5 or 6 years old). It ran stellar (apart obviously from baloo that I disabled). I could even play some Steam games surprisingly well, and kwin was butter smooth.

I now use it on a much faster machine (i3 Kaby Lake desktop, Intel HD 630). Kwin is still butter smooth (even more). Baloo is now perfectly usable thanks to the SSD. However, the very same Steam games that would run perfectly are now extremely slow, even some simple 2D games like Steredenn or BroForce, even when disabling composition. Some other games run better than before (Talos Principle). Also I had numerous complete crashes during the general desktop use but meanwhile I updated the CPU microcode and raised in the bios the memory allocated to the Intel HD so maybe this one is fixed, we'll see.

--> any idea why I get a dramatic FPS drop in many games when upgrading from Intel HD 3000 to Intel HD 630 ? I tried both xserver-xorg-video-intel-modesetting and the HWE one. I tried several kernel versions (lowlatency, 4.10, 4.13). I also fixed the CPU microcode and the default CPU governor (to performance) : no change in this area.


Cheers !

You went from an I5 to an I3. Are you sure that isn't the difference?

Duplicate.

Hi ! Clearly not, this i3 (and higher clocked) is way faster than my previous i5 ; also the HD 630 is several times faster than the format HD 3000.

Thanks for the reply

Also those games that are too slow require very little power.

cheers

https://versus.com/en/intel-core-i3-730 ... re-i5-3470

Dual core vs quad core would be a prime difference, and I would wager that Steam's support for the HD 3000 is more mature than for the newer gpu
And then there is this (but a year old)
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... ssue&num=1

thx for the replies. Actually what I wonder is if that's driver or kwin related. I assure you this i3 is faster with hyperthreading than my 5 y.o i5 at a lower frequency.
I was wondering if other ppl encountered this issue as well.
thanks again
cheers

also thx for the link. I'm surprised it didn't get fixed meanwhile but I'll be patient. kwin and apps are super fast, I don't have time to play anyway

I had very worrying results regarding this issue.

I tried the latest Fedora with both KDE and GNOME. I encountered the very same performance issue in Fedora KDE as in Neon, but Fedora Gnome was butter smooth...
Gnome was probably using the Wayland session but it shouldnt have made a difference anyway, cf my first post.

KWin itself doesnt seem affected though but fullscreen OpenGL apps.

cheers !

Some more tests later...

The problem doesn't occur when using the KDE Wayland session. Although they are not supposed to be faster as they are X games and running through the XWayland wrapper !

So there is definitely an issue related a combination of factors (specific Intel HD 6xx drivers + X + KWin). Issue that doesn't occur with different older Intel HD drivers and the same sw combination...

More tests... Tried 3 distros with different environments. Under X the "super slow display for some simple 2D games" issue occurs under Ubuntu (Unity), Neon (KDE), Fedora (KDE).

For some reason, it doesn't occur under the wayland sessions of Gnome (Fedora) and KDE (Neon).

So, it really seems to be driver-related. I cannot imagine Intel is not aware of this so I guess I don't have to file a bugreport for it. As it doesn't occur anymore under Wayland (+ XWayland), it'll eventually get fixed.

So I'm really looking forward to the end of this month for the next LTS of Plasma that will have a much improved Wayland session !!

More tests... There is also a major instability I didn't get on the same computer with an nvidia card or with different computer with other Intel HD GPUs... I guess it's related to a backported Intel driver in Neon. Checking with the official Ubuntu package.

It's a major instability that seems driver related. I double checked many things (reinstalled, updated microcode etc etc). I yet have to check if it occurs under wayland.

I'm opening a new post about this stability issue. As I'm testing ATM the default Ubuntu Intel HD driver (and not the Neon one), if stability is OK although it's clearly as slow in games, it's a different issue