Frame drops below Vsync every coupel of secound, but killall org_kde_powerdevil fixes it

Hello everyone this is my first post so please bear with me. But I changed from Windows mid 2023 and have not looked back. It’s been great and I have learned so much, having fun all the while.

but since the last update sometime last week. I have noticed if I am watching YouTube or playing any video game. very 10-20 seconds my FPS drops below Vsync. With my partner’s help we looked through the active processes in the system monitor while a game was running and spotted org_kde_powerdevil would jump to the top of the CPU usage list just before the fps would drop.

googling around I found the below form thread with someone having the same issue. I noticed a killall command in the replays and gave it a shot. It works! until I restart the system it stays at Vsync.

not sure if it’s worth pointing out but when I open the power saving setting page in system settings. it says "Power management configuration module could not be loaded” Is this connected to my issue?

Thank you all for your time and support.

Hullo,

For some reason they suggest editing /etc/xdg/autostart/powerdevil.desktop
I will show you how to do this assuming the intended changes are desirable;

  • Copy the powerdevil.desktop file from the system autostart directory to the one in your HOME, after making sure it exists:
mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart
cp /etc/xdg/autostart/powerdevil.desktop ~/.config/autostart/powerdevil.desktop
  • Then edit the copied file, such as with micro:
micro ~/.config/autostart/powerdevil.desktop
  • To change lines 59 and 60 to false and 1 respectively:
X-systemd-skip=false
X-KDE-autostart-phase=1

~One-Liner~
(that is … instead of doing all the steps above you could copy and paste this command)

mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart && cp /etc/xdg/autostart/powerdevil.desktop ~/.config/autostart/powerdevil.desktop && awk -i inplace -F"=" -v OFS="=" '{if($1=="X-systemd-skip") {$2="false"}; if($1=="X-KDE-autostart-phase") {$2="1"} print $0}' ~/.config/autostart/powerdevil.desktop

(then give a reboot and observe)


Possibly. It would seem you may be missing some parts of plasma power control?
Maybe we can look at some packages:

pacman -Qs power

Known issue. Downgrading to ddcutil-1.4.1-1 and powerdevil-5.27.9-1 is the only way to fix it currently.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476375

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