nearly 100% graphics pipe of Rx570 usage when using certain applications

[Duncan]

Marek Kochanowicz posted on Tue, 28 Jun 2022 21:57:59 +0200 as excerpted:

> I am running Arch linux with kde 5.25

Primarily posting as another point of comparison, because I too run 
amdgpu/polaris, tho I think a bit lower performance polaris-11, and 
haven't seen the problem here.  Some details follow.

Gentoo here, live-git-master kde-frameworks and plasma.

>   OpenGL: renderer: AMD Radeon RX 570 Series (polaris10 LLVM 13.0.1 DRM
>     3.46 5.18.7-arch1-1)
>     v: 4.6 Mesa 22.1.2 direct render: Yes

Might have been useful to say what that was from.  If it's kinfocenter I 
don't have that installed here.

But I'm running roughly comparable if not lower grade amdgpu graphics 
altho looks like some slightly newer software (output from glxinfo):

Device: AMD Radeon RX 460 Graphics (polaris11, LLVM 14.0.5, DRM 3.47, 
5.19.0-rc4-dirty)

Same mesa-22.1.2, 4 gig video RAM, 16 gig system RAM.

My CPU is I think even older, AMD fx6100 so around a decade old now.  But 
I do have 16 gig of RAM and upgraded to all SSDs (on paired Samsung EVO 
SSDs in btrfs raid1 mode), which made quite a difference compared to the 
old spinning-rust drives.

> Some KDE applications are bordeline unusable currently. Especially
> kmail. Even changing directory is very slow and resizing the kmail
> window is a sure way to produce graphic pipe usage spike in radeontop to
> 100%. Drag select in dolphin is sluggish. Disabling kwin composition, or
> even launching appliaction under fluxbox does not improve situation.
> Same problems are observed under kwin_wayland. I also tried to use lower
> resolution monitor but it was only slightly better. Firefox and other
> non-qt application appear to work fine.

I'm 100% wayland; the only X I still have installed is xwayland, tho 
because I'm running live-git-master kwin (and pretty much everything else 
kde) I have weston installed as a backup compositor should kwin_wayland go 
broken on me.

I'm not seeing, nor have I recently seen, that sort of graphics issue.  

Tho FWIW I take advantage of gentoo's USE flags to disable pretty much 
everything semantic-desktop related at build-time (also no polkit, etc), 
and switched to claws-mail around the kde 4.6 era when kmail jumped the 
akonadi shark.  None of that *should* have anything to do with graphics 
performance issue you're seeing, but I personally don't find it worth the 
performance cost in general, and it is a major difference between our 
systems.  And particularly if you're still on spinning-rust drives there's 
a chance the I/O contention could make some difference.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman