Ryzen 5 5600g - bad gaming performance

Hello,

I just bought a new computer, with Ryzen 5 5600g (integrated graphics), which I thought I would use until dedicated GPU prices become reasonable again. Unfortunately though I am getting horrible performance in games (non-demanding ones). E.g. in CSGO, on the lowest settings and lowest resolution, I have about 30-50 FPS when things are static, and as soon as the action happens everything freezes long enough that I am shot and dead before I can see the enemy…

According to benchmarks, even on medium settings people are getting well over 100 FPS stably, and on lowest, more than 200 FPS. These benchmarks however are on Windows.

Clearly something is not working well with my setup, but I have no idea where to start…

My hardware is:
Ryzen 5 5600g
B550I aorus pro ax
1x HyperFury 32 GB 3200 MHz RAM
WD black 500 GB SSD

With the latest manjaro iso I got Kernel 5.10. I tried upgrading this to 5.13 but this did not help.

During the installation I chose nonfree drivers, but it appears there are only free drivers available. Currently I have video-linux (from 2018). From mhwd -l I also see video-modesetting and video-vesa, but I am not sure what these are or if I should change something.

Since the integrated GPU is sharing the RAM (in total 1.2 GB), it was suggested in another thread that adding a second RAM module, to get dual channel mode, would be beneficial. In that thread, indeed it had some effect, but not big enough to be the main issue.

I do not know if it is relevant, but in glxgears I get 14k FPS. Also, during installation, I encrypted the root, home and swap partitions with luks.

Do you have some idea what I could try?

Thanks a lot!

Looks like the gpu is still running in low mode… try running it with gamemode: Gamemode - ArchWiki

Also keep sure the service is running.

There are power profiles which I guess should be set by the game mode: AMDGPU - ArchWiki

Also try for example DOTA, which runs natively with OpenGL and Vulkan (Try both APIs if you see a difference). In general Vulkan runs much faster on Linux and most Games on Linux, which are ported from Windows to Linux with OpenGL are mostly optimized for NVIDIA and not AMD/ATI, expect not the best performance there.

When it comes to Windows Games running with wine and dxvk, then AMD is better, since it uses vulkan there. But this is my experience.

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You want to use the free drivers for AMD anyway. Only way to get the nonfree drivers for AMD is via AUR.

That is what you want to use. It’s just a meta package for the open source drivers in the kernel.

You probably also want to turn your CPU governor on to Performance. I set mine via CoreCtrl. Though you can do it using gamemode too.

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The 5600G is the little brother to the 5700G, which is what I am currently using.

And my benchmarks indicates that at least the 5700G is capable of about 110 FPS in Unvanquished in Ultra mode.

I don’t know how much “smaller” or weaker the 5600g is, but I know it uses your system RAM.
You only have 1 stick of system RAM, effectively halving the speed the GPU can use it. If you had 2x 16 GB sticks, you would benefit from the Dual-Channel technology, which will increase the speed of applications using RAM by a fair share.

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Gigabyte have released a new BIOS version for this motherboard today recently:

B550I AORUS PRO AX (rev. 1.0) | GIGABYTE Global

F13 - 2021/07/13
Update AMD AGESA ComboV2 1.2.0.3 B for Ryzen 5000 G-Series processors support

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You mean last month, right?

2021/07/13 translates to July 13th 2021 and we are in August. :wink:

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Thanks a lot for your quick replies!

I will try gamemode when I am back from work. I will also try some other games as suggested.

Regarding the RAM, indeed having a single stick is not optimal, but as suggested in another thread (which I of course cannot find now…) using an older Ryzen the real effect on in-game performance did not seem to depend much on this. I plan on upgrading to 2x32 GB in the near future, but if I cannot get it to work with gamemode or something else I might try to buy a second stick earlier than planned.

As for the firmware, I had to flash the bios to the latest version (F13) in order to boot the computer.

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idk about that… you’re doing a lot more work on 1 RAM card to run both the CPU and iGPU. Dual RAM helps it.

Also, make sure you have XMP on in your BIOS so that you are actually running your RAM at 3200MHz.

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Thanks a lot everyone.

Things are running smoother now.

  • Setting XMP profile to 3200 MHz in BIOS did not help
  • gamemode did not seem to do much if anything
  • Games with Vulkan still had problems
  • the dynamic (default) mode of the VRAM appeared problematic. In some games (e.g. WarThunder) the dedicated VRAM would not reach the maximum of 2 GB, instead it remained at 30 MB, causing crashes. I had to change this (UMA) in BIOS to forced and 2 GB
  • I also bought another RAM module, so now I have 2x32 GB, 3200 MHz

WarThunder runs great now ( ~100 FPS with medium settings)

CSGO is okay, 60-100 FPS; sometimes it drops to 50 FPS, but most importantly, the freezes have completely disappeared

Civ6 is running great, and always was running great (even before getting the second RAM module or fixing the VRAM issue)

CitiesSkylines was unplayable before, but now it works great even on medium settings

I will see if I can still tweak some more. In that case I will come back and update the thread.

Ok. So I am running Dota2. Maxed out settings. 1080p 75Hz at ~100FPS. I am running POP OS though.
5600G, 2x8GB, 1TB nvme on a ASRock B550M-ITX/ac and a 240mm AIO.
I have seen my 3200Mhz RAM being detected as 2666Mhz in BIOS. Which I will change.
I am not able to get a CPU temp in OS yet though. Only in BIOS. No idea why. Does any one know?

Otherwise, I can volunteer to test other settings OP or others want.

Does your motherboard support up to 3200?

I have the same issue on my 5700G, so I guess the support is just not in the kernel yet.

Yeah, you have to turn on XMP

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Yes. MoBo supports ~4k something. CPU supports 3200. I have to enable XMP. I built this like yesterday and benchmarked DoTA on stock. That’s all. I’m at work ATM and can’t change much.

I see. There was a BIOS update released ~ a week ago. Do you not have temp with that installed?

For iGPUs, going dual channel (so two ram modules) is very important - they are essentially bandwidth limited (the GPU part could be much faster with higher bandwidth memory, which is why consoles use GDDR instead of DDR memory).
You already bought another stick, so that’s fine.
Also, I have seen several threads complaining about CS:GO not working well on Linux in general and AMD in particular. Something about the game, probably - so definitely test more games.
It’s also possible (although maybe not likely in that case) that with the 5600G being relatively new, it’s not 100% supported by Linux yet, which might also create some performance issues.

The latest for my motherboard was released on August 9th. And that’s the one I am running. :slight_smile:

@Strit Ah perfect. I’ll try to ping you if an update gives me temps. For the moment I’m assuming package temp / gpu temp + ~10C = CPU Temp.

Yeah, same here. I got my GPU temps showing. :wink: