AMD ON MANJARO LINUX - Perfs on Ryzen 5, Radeon RX580
820After I published the previous video on my AMD build, I got a lot of comments saying the performance was a bit underwhelming, and I should try to update the kernel. I did that, and it didn't change much. So I went a different route, and switched distributions entirely. Let's take a look at how this changed the performance !
What I use to make my videos:
Microphone: https://amzn.to/2PsNWXl
Articulated mic arm: https://amzn.to/2Iy6DZ2
Tripod: https://amzn.to/2VeLRUt
Monitor: https://amzn.to/2UQRZTb
Speakers: https://amzn.to/2IR7qDR
Bluetooth USB adapter: https://amzn.to/2UQS89b
Keyboard: https://amzn.to/2IAuIyD
Smartphone lenses: https://amzn.to/2DnNrcr
Graphics card: https://amzn.to/2XCEaVo
Motherboard: https://amzn.to/2KZt63t
CPU: https://amzn.to/2IFjKrw
Link to the performance test on elementary OS for the same build: https://youtu.be/viZJwNvDRyM
The distribution
I mostly stayed on debian or ubuntu based distributions, and I'm very familiar with the debian packaging system, but it was time to try something new. I went for Manjaro Budgie. Why ? Because Manjaro has been highly recommended, and because I don't know much about Budgie.I decided to wipe out the whole disk and go all in. Everything worked fine and was recognized perfectly. I'll talk about Budgie in another video, but I liked the simple experience, and since Steam was preinstalled, I started downloading and playing the games.
Games
Vermintide ran perfectly through DXVK, no additionnal configuration needed, and reached an almost perfectly stable 60FPS at max settings. This shows all the difference a system can make, since both distros used the same versions of Mesa, AMDGPU, and Manjaro is on kernel 4.19.
I was pretty happy about this, as you can imagine, so I tried Deathwing. It ran perfectly in fullscreen mode by default, at max settings, and 60FPS most of the time, apart from some occasional stutters when loading a new asset or shader, but that's a drawback of DXVK, as I understand it, and does not occur after you've cached said object or shader.
Now on to native games:
Dawn Of War 3, at a mix of max and high settings, got around 45FPS with Vulkan enabled. Without Vulkan, with the same settings, I got 56 FPS. This is a big improvement over the same game at the same settings on elementary OS !
Total War Warhammer 2, at the same settings as on elementary OS, got a more stable 60FPS in the map and during battles, which is good, but no major performance improvement.
I didn't try CS GO, since it ran fine before, at around 100 - 120 FPS.
Video rendering
Now, I took my KDE VS GNOME video, and rendered it with Kdenlive, installed with Flatpak, just as I did on elementary OS. I used the higher quality MP4 setting, and 12 threads. The video completed its rendering in about 52 minutes, which is about the same as elementary OS, so I did not notice any gain here. As a lot of comments pointed out, Kdenlive isn't hardware accelerated, so it only uses the CPU to render videos, and there's not much you can change to that, even with better drivers.
To conclude this video, I was skeptical of a distro change in terms of performance. Well I was wrong. With Manjaro, I got a huge performance boost, and Proton games ran way better, with DXVK. Whether that's due to the change of desktop environment (from pantheon to budgie), or the the distro itself and its more up to date libraries and tools, I don't know yet, but I couldn't be happier. VIdeo rendering is still snappier than my older machine, even though switching distros didn't change a thing here.
I'll stick with Manjaro for the time being, and will give my impressions on it, as well as on Budgie, compared to a debian based distribution, in future videos. Stay tuned for that !
Follow me on Twitter : http://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP
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Also Watch my Experience with Manjaro Budgie on a Full AMD Linux Build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZdj4Q08fBg
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