Windows Games through Proton woeful on 3970x when SMT enabled

Issues & Assistance
1

Hi all,

I am having an issue with Windows games through proton running on linux, and was wondering if someone here might have some advice on what might be causing this issue.

I have a threadripper 3970x, 128GB ram and 2x2TB nvme drives (btrfs raid 0) running CahyOS. Motherboard is a Gigabyte Aorus TRX30 Extreme, and GPU is AMD 6900XT.

The system absolutely screams when running this OS - very snappy - but i have an issue that I have been trying to solve for some time now - when running windows games such as Timberborn in Steam using proton DB, the game is unplayable - 1 fps or worse.

If I disable SMT in the motherboards bios, the game runs nice and smooth.

Of course the simple solution is to just leave SMT (hyperthreading) disabled, but I’d like to solve why the windows games perform badly when run through proton with SMT enabled.

If anyone has any suggestions of what might be the cause, it would be much appreciated.

I have tried setting the scheduler_extentions and have some some very minor changes, but still very unplayable. I have also tried using some different kernels but each of them ended up with the same result. Stuttering slow games that are unplayable.

This may also be purely a Proton issue, and the only solution is to leave SMT disabled - but maybe someone here might know what might cause this and what to do to stop it from behaving like this.

Thanks in advance

2

Try linux-cachyos-server kernel. What proton build are you using? Steam flatpak or native? What cpu freq governor are you set?

3

Hi - thanks for the response. I did try the server kernel previously, but i will give it another go. I have since done a re-install so will try it again.

The cpu frequency governor is set to performance.

Steam is the native version as well as the cachy os native build of proton.

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I have to head out now but will try the server kernel again when I get back - thanks :slight_smile:

4

Thanks - i tried the server kernel both lto and non lto, but it didn’t make any difference with SMT enabled, however, I have disabled SMT for the time being and the server kernel appears to work better for my machine than the standard cachyos kernel - so i’ll leave it on that for a while and see how it goes.

Thanks for your suggestions

5

Hi All

So i have done some more research and I have re-enabled SMT, and using the CachyOS default kernel, and have the game playing fine now. I definitely have to restrict the core count for the game, but the following works well for me - keeping in mind I have the vulkan shaders download turned off in steam.

__GL_SHADER_DISK_CACHE_SKIP_CLEANUP=1 DXVK_ASYNC=1 WINE_CPU_TOPOLOGY=8 game-performance %command%

Hope this helps someone

Cheers :slight_smile: