Hi all, Not sure if this is a distro specific, DE specific, a monitor brand specific or just linux/AMD in general. So, I have an RX580 GPU. It is an older one, but does just for what I do on my PC (emulation). Everything works fine until I start one of the emulators and play a game. I have two 27" 4k monitors, a dell and a sceptre. Once the game starts, the sceptre monitor starts going black every couple of seconds, then comes back up. This continues until I stop the game. Both monitors are connected through DP to the GPU. Not sure what to do, to be honest. All drivers are there when I checked (as far as I know). This happens on both wayland and xorg. Any input is greatly appreciated! If anyone needs more info, please let me know. Thank you
System is:
Operating System: EndeavourOS KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.8 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.110.0 Qt Version: 5.15.10 Kernel Version: 6.5.5-arch1-1 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 580 Series Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Product Name: A520I AC System Version: -CF
This sounds like what my system does as well, but I made I do it intentionally. It’s a KWin scrip called Autocompose. Does endeavor ship it by default?
It is caused by the KDE compositor turning off to re-direct GPU resources to the game. With the compositor off, stuff like discord or firefox on the second monitor will sometimes blank out as the compositor is no-longer working to, you know, composite the desktop.
This is not a major problem. If I want something like youtube on my second monitor, I’ve taken to using the play/pause button on my keyboard to toggle playback of the video, this wakes the second screen back up for me, without turning on compositing and trading in fps.
If this is the issue you are experiencing:
You can toggle compositing with ctrl+alt+f12
You could disable the automated compositor toggling, the extension that enables the feature can be found among the installed kwin scripts. This will negatively impact framerates, and especially frametimes.
Endeavour installs a mostly default DE when you make your choice of which one to use, so most of the DE’s come as packaged by the devs. If I’m not mistaken Autocompose is a default script included with KDE.
I say mostly, because some parts of the DE you use is incompatible with the Arch ecosystem and disabled by default. For example, Discover on KDE is pretty much unusable on arch/EndeavourOS because the repos aren’t adequately designed for such a setup.
So this script is not even installed on my system. I did find it when I searched it, but didn’t install it. Also, the issues seems to be a ton better now when I switched the affected monitor to HDMI from DP. It does go black, but like once every 5 minutes or even longer. I don’t really play demanding games, as this PC is for emulation only. Do you think I should install that script and mess with it?
Hm. Then it’s definitely not related to compositing acting up. I’m stumped on what your issue might be. What happens if you make the dodgy monitor the main one? Or use some other display entirely for a secondary monitor?
It’s a good script, it doesn’t buy you a lot of fps, but the improvement in frame-times is noticeable to me. I’d imagine even undemanding games would feel better with the reduction in input latency that nets you.
You could disable compositing altogether if you don’t care about visual desktop effects and animations, the script is just a way to automate turning it off only when needed. And you can always toggle it manually with ctrl+alt+f12.
Where do I disable the compositor manually instead of the key combination? Where in the settings is it located? Also, I’ll try to make the asshole monitor the main one and see what happens.
Settings>Display and Monitor>Compositor>Uncheck “Enable on startup”
Thank you for that. The script sounds like a good idea. I didn’t find “autocompose”, I found “autocomposer”, is that the same one?
yes
Yup, that’s the one. Thank you. I’ll mess with it and see