Experience playing on Ryzen APU?

[pkk]

Is anyone else playing TF2 using a Ryzen APU? What is your experience?

I've been playing Transport Fever 2 on a Ryzen APU. But even with current TF 2 and current drivers I still get too many crashes.

On average, I'd say it crashes more than once per hour for me. Often, but not always the crash happens when zooming out using the mouse wheel.
On Windows 10, usually TF2 stops, After I while I first get a black, then a white screen, then the Windows dialog that allows me to terminate the non-responsive TF2. Sometimes, that won't work, and I'll have to use Alt+Ctrl+Del to log out to terminate TF2. On GNU/Linux I usually get a hard system lockup, and have to use the reset button.

Since the computer is a rather new build, I first suspected a hardware issue. But it is stable under test loads (e.g. prime95, FurMark).

[CunkFeatures]

Could be down to the game,
Poor drivers (maybe ask on the AMD forums),
Lack of RAM (the APU shares the much slower system RAM rather than a dedicated GPU that uses its own VRAM),
Slow GPU (listed as 7% slower than a AMD HD 7970 Mobile and 753% slower than a 2080Ti) https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-RX-Vega-11-GPU.278628.0.html
(Anno 1800 gets 58fps @ 720p)

The fact it locks up Linux would suggest AMDs open source drivers are still pants? As it locks both OSs up my monies on the APU not being the best GPU for games, or a VRAM issue.

I always go dedicated, even on my laptops. nVidia and mesa drivers are good my end.

[SlimNasty™]

I'd say you're running below the minimum specs for the game if you're not using an actual graphics card and running on low ram, so it should be expected to have a lot of issues.

[pkk]

Originally posted by SlimNasty™:

I'd say you're running below the minimum specs for the game if you're not using an actual graphics card and running on low ram, so it should be expected to have a lot of issues.

The machine has only 16 GB. Next time I play, I'll try to keep track of the TF2 RAM use, to see if that could be a problem.

[pkk]

Originally posted by pkk:

Originally posted by SlimNasty™:

I'd say you're running below the minimum specs for the game if you're not using an actual graphics card and running on low ram, so it should be expected to have a lot of issues.

The machine has only 16 GB. Next time I play, I'll try to keep track of the TF2 RAM use, to see if that could be a problem.

I just got the usual crash using the current testing version of TF2 on Windows. At the time of the crash there were still 7 GB of free RAM.

P.S.: I don't see any indication of a problem in stdout.txt either.

[KingyBear]

It should be fine, I played on a laptop from 2015 that has an even weaker gpu and it was fine. I was playing on a small map with the lowest settings.

I would test running the game with no mods and try running a different game and see if you have issues.

[pkk]

Originally posted by KingyBear:

It should be fine, I played on a laptop from 2015 that has an even weaker gpu and it was fine. I was playing on a small map with the lowest settings.

I would test running the game with no mods and try running a different game and see if you have issues.

I run without mods. While I have not tried a different game on Windows 10 on that system yet, various stress-tests (e.g. prime95, Furmark) work fine.
Which other game(s) would you recommend for testing? It probably should be one game that uses OpenGl 4.x (so it is likely to also crash if the bug is in the graphics driver) and a DirectX one (so it is likely to crash if it is a hardware issue, but unlikely to crash if it is an OpenGl driver issue).

GPU weakness should not result in crashes anyway, just in low framerates (from the release notes we can see that the devs even support Intel integrated HD graphis, and fix bugs affecting them, even though they are far below minimum requirements - which makes a lot of sense, after all a bug in the game is a bug in the game, and even when it can only be reproduced on Intel HD today, it might crash the next driver for some other GPU tomorrow).

[Martin]

Originally posted by pkk:

Is anyone else playing TF2 using a Ryzen APU? What is your experience?

I've been playing Transport Fever 2 on a Ryzen APU. But even with current TF 2 and current drivers I still get too many crashes.

On average, I'd say it crashes more than once per hour for me. Often, but not always the crash happens when zooming out using the mouse wheel.
On Windows 10, usually TF2 stops, After I while I first get a black, then a white screen, then the Windows dialog that allows me to terminate the non-responsive TF2. Sometimes, that won't work, and I'll have to use Alt+Ctrl+Del to log out to terminate TF2. On GNU/Linux I usually get a hard system lockup, and have to use the reset button.

Since the computer is a rather new build, I first suspected a hardware issue. But it is stable under test loads (e.g. prime95, FurMark).

Who uses APU.. c'mon man.. calm yoursel'

I use Ryzen 1600x Cpu.. :)

And I do get the odd ctd.. No idea what's causing it, feels like something specific ingame.. as on the occasions it's crashed, restarting pc, reloading game it often crash again, at roughly the same point.

I've played many games, where it's never crashed.. so, I dunno.. could be the cpu or the game.

[KingyBear]

You should try running the Unigine Heaven Benchmark, it has DirectX and OpenGL settings

[pkk]

Looks like this is a problem with my system: The Unigine benchmark crashed once - graphical corruption appeared, then the crash about a second later (at 2580x1080 resolution, couldn't get it to crash at 1920x1080). Cities: Skylines crashed thrice within 2 hours (twice at 2560x1080, once at 1920x1080).
Of course, now I have no idea what to do now (I already took apart the system and reassembled it, to ensure that there is no unrelaiable connection or bad thermal paste). I guess the only way would be to replace components one by one, but that would require a full second set of components.

Since I rememebr some people having problems only when using HDMI on their integrated graphics, I did the 1920x1080 tests using DVI instead of HDMI (which I used for the 2560x1080 tests).

[KingyBear]

1st update your bios and reset it to factory settings.

Then I would say, try testing one stick of memory in each slot of the motherboard. Then test the other stick of memory. If both stick crash in all memory slots this will rule out the motherboard dimm slots and the memory.

If that doesn't work then I think you will need to get a second hand GPU to test. Anything you can find from the last 10 years will be fine. Install that and try running unigine again.

[pkk]

Originally posted by KingyBear:

1st update your bios and reset it to factory settings.

Then I would say, try testing one stick of memory in each slot of the motherboard. Then test the other stick of memory. If both stick crash in all memory slots this will rule out the motherboard dimm slots and the memory.

The BIOS is the latest and at factory setting with one exception: For the RAM I've tried both the default and the XMP. The computer is noticeably faster with XMP, but crashes either way (at least in Transport Fever, haven't tried Unigine benchmark without XMP yet, but prime95 also works either way).

I'll try the single stick / DIMM idea, but have little hope: If this was a RAM problem, it probably would have shown up in prime95 or during other use.

From what I experienced so far, apparently only heavy graphics use for a substantial amount of time willn trigger the issue (and then not all types of graphics - Furmark apparently doesn't trigger the bug).

[KingyBear]

I would use memtest86 (https://www.memtest86.com/) for testing the ram, prime95 is more of a cpu test.

[pkk]

So I did the testing with modules / slots using Unigine Heaven today.

Indeed I only see the crash with one of the two modules (no matter which slot the module is in). The other module seems to work in either slot.

So I guess the module is faulty or there is a compability issue. Both modules are Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3200C16, which are not in the list of supported modules for my mainboard (but other CMK16GX4M2B3xxxCxx modules are).

P.S.: Annoyingly, a crash of Citites:Skylines on GNU/Linux yesterday left the btrfs filesystem in a broken state that I could not recover from. I guess I'll reinstall with just the working module.

[pkk]

Yesterday, I played for quite some time using a set of two different memory modules. There were no problems. So with the memory hardware issue fixed, the situation with Transport Fever 2 is:

Transport Fever 2 works well on Ryzen APUs. I am able to play without encountering any technical issues. Performance is fine, too.