I got this Beelink mini pc from Amazon planning to hook it up to my living room TV and play movies and stream TV with. And I was shocked and amazed to discover that this little thing could run games like Hi-Fi Rush and MGSV:PP on max settings! Sure the fans made it sound like a small jet engine, but it never skipped frames or lagged on me even once! I know it’s not a power house: it couldn’t run Yakuza Zero or Neir Automata very well. But I was still thrilled with what it could do!
Well it shipped with Windows 11, and I finally decided to fix that. A couple days ago I switched over to Mint, tho I’m running Kubuntu now. The switch was quick and painless, and honestly getting used to Linux has been pretty fun! But now it runs a lot of my games like a slide show. I’ve been digging at this for a few days now, updating drivers and setting up Proton. I’ve found a lot of helpful guides and stuff on line, but very little about the hardware I have in this situation. Apparently AMD processors are great for Linux, but I feel like it’s not working with the integrated graphics card. Tried to find the right driver on their website, but I haven’t had much luck. So, here’s hoping the community can help. Any tips for a newbie?
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700U (16) @ 4.37 GHz | GPU: AMD Lucienne [Integrated]
You shouldn’t need to download any graphics drivers, Ubuntu (and pretty much every other distribution) ships with the open-source AMD driver stack by default, which are significantly better than and less hassle than the proprietary drivers for pretty much all purposes. If you’re getting video out it’s almost certainly already using the internal GPU, but if you’re unsure you can open a terminal and run
sudo apt install mesa-utilsand thenglxinfo -Bto double-check what is being used for rendering.Yup, it lists AMD radeon graphics as what’s in use. The visuals all look fine, no glitching or artifacting, but even with the tuning I’ve done so far I can barely get the frame rate above 20fps.
Framerate above 20 in what with what settings? That’s kinda key information :P
Hi-Fi Rush at max settings is my benchmark for this. It ran flawlessly when this was a windows 11 machine, so I’m trying to get it to hit that mark again.
How much fps is “flawlessly” ?
A fair question, I don’t honestly know. 😅 I hadn’t thought to pull up in-game stats to check fps, but I’ve been gaming most of my life. What I called “flawless” was running a smooth 50-60 fps with no frame skipping or input lagging, no hiccups or issues. Now it feels like it’s getting about 5-10 fps at best, it looks like a slide show, and input lag is at least a second.