I use this website to test out the graphics capability of a computer: https://sirokos.com/GPUAsteroids/ ; it is a Chrome WebVR experiment. However, I have been noticing some odd performance issues with it when it should be running smoothly. It often stutters a lot, and the odd thing is that it seems to be better some days and worse on other days. I tried using the chrome://tracing tool (it generates very detailed logs of rendering, UI, etc.), and I decided to record the “Rendering” when I had the webpage open. Surprisingly, there were no frame drops reported, despite the animation not being smooth. The stuttering is also present in Firefox. On another slightly related note, when I have a youtube video playing and I open the start menu and start typing in the search bar, the video appears to pause for a split second and drop frames, but there are no dropped frames reported in “stats for nerds.” Despite this, every animation and window dragging/resizing is smooth, and nostalgic Flash games run without any issues. I am using the default AMDGPU drivers (I enabled them by editing the grub.cfg file) on Zorin OS Core 15.3, although I don’t know if there is a way to update them. My CPU is an Intel Xeon E5-2680 V4, my graphics card is an AMD FirePro S10000 12GB, and my RAM is 32GB of 2133mhz ECC DDR4 (I checked and made sure that ECC is enabled; it is running multi-bit Error Correction Code).
Does anyone have any idea what may be causing this?
EDIT: After playing around with the computer for a little bit, I noticed something else. On Chrome, any 60fps video has lots of dropped frames, but on Firefox, the video plays back extremely smoothly. What’s weird is that about a week ago, Chrome was the browser that played 60fps videos smoothly, but Firefox suffered from weird screen-tearing artifacts in Youtube videos, so I am convinced that the above issues may be related to drivers/software/updates, as I have not experienced anything that would make it seem like my GPU is dying (it runs games fine without crashing or anything). Another thing is that the SuperTuxKart game (its like MarioKart) suffers from odd micro-freezes in certain points of a map. I relaunched it and played it on the lowest settings at 720p, but it freezes in place for a split second in the exact same spots on the same map every time. Apologies for my rambling, but I am trying to document every single “stuttering” issue I have found on my system in order to give the most information to anyone who wants to help me.
The Software Updater says “No additional drivers available”, which is why I used the default open-source AMDGPU drivers. The only proprietary drivers I can find online are the AMDGPU-Pro drivers, but I don’t want to use those since I tried installing them on Ubuntu once, and it kept booting into the GRUB terminal thing (not sure what it was), so I wiped the SSD and installed Zorin OS. All of my Steam games run fine via Proton (which uses Vulkan), and the Google Earth website runs smoothly with almost no lag. The only issues are video playback (it even drops frames at 144p, whereas there are no issues in Firefox even with 4k60fps) and certain WebVR experiments (like the webpage I put in the original post). I had no issues with video playback in Chrome about a week ago. I’ll try uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome to see if that will do anything.
I thought that Firefox experienced the same WebGL lag as Chrome, but I just realized that I was quite wrong. Just now when I opened the website with the 3d shapes going around the screen, the animation was butter smooth. As stated in the previous post, 4k60fps video also played smoothly as well. However, Google Earth does not run as smooth as it does on Chrome (since it says Firefox is using an experimental version of Google Earth), so I am wondering if anyone knows what Chrome-specific thing would be causing the dropped video frames and WebGL stuttering.
I finally fixed the problem. It appears that on Wayland, Chrome seems to drop frames on YouTube videos. Switching back to the “Default” window server fixed the issue. However, on the “Default” window server, it appears that in Firefox, the WebGL animation is stuck at 30hz, but that isn’t too big of a deal, as I finally found the root cause of the stuttering. The one thing I found in chrome://gpu that seemed different between Wayland and the default window server was this parameter, which was disabled on the default but enabled on Wayland:
clamp_msc_rate (OpenGL workarounds) 1042393: Enabled: IsLinux() && IsWayland() Some drivers return bogus values for GetMscRate, so we clamp it to 30Hz