I’m trying to run the standalone (i.e. non-Steam) version of Warframe. The game installs and runs, but performance is bad and choppy to the point of being unplayable, even on the lowest settings. I’m wondering if this is to do with the fact that the game isn’t using my laptop’s dedicated graphics card, but the integrated one:
I’n the game’s system options in Lutris I’ve checked “Use PRIME”, but that isn’t making Warframe use the AMD GPU, although DRI_PRIME=1 should work judging from the output of glxinfo:
I’ve solved the issue! The problem wasn’t with Lutris or Warframe at all, but rather with my graphics card drivers. The default radeon driver did not work with Vulkan, which is why anything running on Vulkan would skip the card and use the integrated one instead.
If anyone comes across this issue with AMD hybrid graphics in the future, here’s what I did:
I switched from the radeon to the amdgpu driver by blacklisting the radeon kernel module based on the instructions on the Arch wiki. Basically you need to create a .conf file in /etc/modprobe.d that contains the line: blacklist radeon
I installed the package amdgpu-experimental. Without it, there were problems with using the dedicated card.
I uninstalled the packages amdvlk and lib32amdvlk (I had previously installed them trying to see if they would fix the problem. They didn’t fix it). With these, Warframe and other programmes would load correctly with the dedicated graphics card, but wouldn’t display properly (just lots of horizontal coloured lines). Just vulkan-radeon and lib32-vulkan-radeon were enough for everything to work.
