Switching to Bazzite fixed my long-standing AMD RX 9070XT performance issues on Linux with certain titles

General
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Hey there!

I switched over to Bazzite yesterday from bog standard Fedora 42, and I was pleasantly surprised that it fixed some REALLY weird performance issues that I had been stuck with since getting my new AMD RX 9070XT.

Most games ran fine, but for a very small number of games, I saw my average framerate inexplicably tank. Doom: The Dark Ages was one, and I needed to switch to AMDVLK to get good performance. That appears to be fixed by switching to Bazzite.

BUT, more importantly, I was seeing TERRIBLE performance in a game that my machine should have absolutely destroyed:

Final Fantasy XIV

I was getting 40FPS on the lowest settings in populated areas, sometimes dipping all the way down to the high teens…consistently. It didnt happen on my old card, and despite going to the FFXIV linux community, I couldnt find a single other person who had my issue. This is an Unreal Engine 3 game that was created more than a decade ago now, and my brand new AMD GPU could not run it.

Changing proton versions didnt work. Updating my mesa version didn’t work. Switching to AMDVLK didnt work, nor did pulling in the latest unstable version of RADV. I even completely wiped my Fedora install and started fresh to rule out that I could have possibly configured my system in a way that was affecting my game. The game seemed destined to run as if I were trying to run it on a potato. Nobody could help me, and so for months I just kind of sucked it up and played the game at absolutely terrible frame rates.

I booted it up today. On Bazzite? No problem. None whatsoever. I have no idea what Bazzite could POSSIBLY be doing differently, but my framerate soared. I’m getting between 80 and 120 FPS depending on the area now on max settings. It’s buttery smooth. I am -SO- excited. I had this really niche issue that seemed to be very specific to my model of GPU and something that Bazzite has done with its patched, immutable kernel managed to completely wipe away this infuriating, unsolveable issue.

I wish I knew enough about kernel development to compare the game’s performance on this kernel and the Fedora kernel with the appropriate debug metrics so that I could open a bug report upstream. This was this really weird phantom issue that I was unable to solve for the better part of this last year, and hopping to Bazzite made it completely disappear.

So, uh, whatever you guys did? Thank you!

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This is why, every time I get the urge to try another distro, I contemplate for a bit and say “naah, I’m good.”

I was thinking of trying Fedora lately and just thinking how many adjustments I need to make to get it to work… Like installing media codecs, wine, protontricks, winetricks, and many others I just can’t think of.

Life is good here. They have pretty much everything covered out of the box. There even is a ujust command to install Davinci Resolve, because devs know a lot of people have trouble installing it on Linux so they went ahead and added a convenient command to do the hardwork for you.

I’ll take this opportunity to thank universal blue team I guess. You people rock! I am dabbling into programming lately at the ripe old age of 35 and if, one day, I learn enough to contribute to open source projects and can somehow fix one bug in Bazzite, I will be really happy!