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   The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 18:37:12 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

   Got PopOS installed on the old workstation last night, was very easy and the base setup runs very well, nippy and nice looking. Fractional scaling even works fairly well. I missed Directory Opus immediately, Double Commander is quite good but isn’t quite as nice. I haven’t tried running Affinity under Bottles/Wine yet. But by far the main problem is that UE runs terribly, about 30% slower than the same hardware in Windows 😕 Not sure why, AMD GPU perhaps

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     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 18:37:07 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     in reply to

     @sinbad

     I hope this isn't annoying, but I have some quality of life tips that you may do with as you will.

     • The Pop! Shop is about to be replaced by the more stable COSMIC Store, which you should definitely install (from the Pop!_Shop) now.

     • If you've got an AMD GPU, the Kisak/Valve mesa drivers (https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa) are worth installing from PPA - but Pop is generally not great for older hardware, in my experience. There's a lot of focus on the new, because they primarily support their own OEM hardware.

     • The current churn of flaky Pop!_OS kernels that misbehaved on older hardware drove me nuts, so I switched to the XanMod kernel (https://xanmod.org/) for an instant performance boost.

     I do still run it on older hardware, but it's more of a chore than it ought to be compared to some other options.

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     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 18:37:08 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     It’s a shame because a lot of the system is snappier than when running Windows. Some bits aren’t: the “Pop Shop” app is laggy AF whenever you do anything like search or install things but you don’t have to use that. I like how Gnome looks, but hate that it doesn’t remember where you last placed app windows when you reopen them (I know, KDE exists). Changing the default clang version was not well documented(UE needs clang 16 which dists don’t have). But I’m sure I could work with it

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     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 18:37:09 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     Oh and it crashed in the Vulkan renderer when I closed the window 🙄

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     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 18:37:10 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     Nah that didn’t help. As well as the frame rate being low generally, it spikes down to the 20s every couple of seconds. To repeat this is the same hardware I was using on Windows until recently so I know it can do better, solid 60 with these settings / viewport sizes. It lags the whole UE UI.

     I’ve checked and it’s running the Vulkan backend and my drivers are up to date (AFAICT). It’s not very usable; if you put a beastier GPU in you could maybe hide it but ugh - and those spikes are not great

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     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 18:37:11 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     This is an older GPU and I’m running 4K so I’m careful about the size of the viewport, but I used to get 60fps on the same size viewport in Windows and it struggles to hit more than 40 here. That’s with all the Lumen stuff turned off in the super basic FPS example.

     Actually now I think I forgot to turn off virtual shadow maps. Will have to try it without that

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     13 barn owls in a trenchcoat (hauntedowlbear@eldritch.cafe)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 18:44:31 JST 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     in reply to

     @sinbad

     While Pop!_OS has a very high probability of being all "this just works out of the box" on shiny new laptops and desktops, with great support for new hardware drops, there's a bit more "getting it just so" involved if your gear's a bit older, I've found.

     (I have it running on a 12 year old laptop and an 8 year old desktop, as well as my newer workstations.)

     I wrote a tutorial to Pop kernel swapping for my household, so shout if you want a copy of that. (I really ought to put that on my blog or something.)

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     The Seven Voyages Of Steve (sinbad@mastodon.gamedev.place)'s status on Wednesday, 12-Jun-2024 18:44:32 JST The Seven Voyages Of Steve

     in reply to

     • 13 barn owls in a trenchcoat

     @HauntedOwlbear ok that’s useful, thanks. May noodle about a bit more of an evening to see