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]
UPDATES:
Thanks again to everyone so far that’s offered advice, but it hasn’t seemed to have helped much…
I made sure the power mode is set to Performance, and turned the settings all the way to their lowest at 1080p. Someone had suggested using Flatseal to check permissions, but steam did not show up there, so it was seemingly a dead end. I even switched to Bazzite.
But I’m still only getting 10fps at most, regardless of graphic settings. I’m not really sure what else to do at this point.
Ahh okay. The big thing I was concerned about was if you’d installed graphics drivers from the AMD website, as those would likely be worse performing compared to what comes with Linux built in, and can do wonky things if done slightly wrong, so most avoid them unless they need to do like, scientific compute stuff.
The performance of the Linux driver is very good compared to the Windows one, usually being at parity or even slightly better. Proton can introduce a slight overhead, but not enough to explain the delta in your experience.
The only thing jumping out to me is that you mentioned running hi-fi rush at maximum settings as your benchmark. I looked into the recommended hardware for that game on its steam page, and while it does have a fairly low minimum requirement, the recommended specs are actually very beefy, suggesting an RTX 2070 or RX 6600, which are multiple times more powerful than the integrated graphics on your Beelink.
When I look at what other people are able to achieve on Windows with the same APU as yours in hi-fi rush, their graphics settings appear to be set to low/medium settings, and with a small resolution of 1366x768. At those settings, they seem to be getting around 60fps.
Are you absolutely sure you were maxing out the graphics settings in hi-fi rush on Windows, and at a higher resolution than 1366x768? If you drop the settings to match what is displayed in the linked video, can you achieve similar performance on Linux?
Its been a while since I used AMD graphics on Windows, but I seem to recall that the Windows AMD driver had an ability to automatically set graphics settings for you for an optimal experience, and I suspect it may have lowered the settings automatically without you realizing it, making the performance seem surprisingly good.
I did actually go to AMD’s website, and debated which of those drivers might help if at all! Instead of messing with those, I decided to ask for help. Glad I did! Lol
I’m positive about the graphics settings on windows 11: when I got the game I cranked everything to max just to see how the machine would handle it, and it went perfectly! I’ve read that windows apparently uses some kind of AI or something to optimize games as someone plays them, so that may be it. I’ll double check with various setting when I get home today.
Just to narrow it down further, were you getting bad performance on Linux Mint too, or did you only install games on Kubuntu?
Another user mentioned that the power settings can have a huge effect, which also seems like a good lead to look into. You should be able to check it by opening your settings panel and going to the Power Management section. In there should be a Power Profile setting. If it’s set to power save mode, it’ll limit your performance quite a bit.
Yes, I was having these same issues on mint. Literally everything else has worked fine, the most trouble I had was fixing the audio output, and that just took a few minutes.
I saw the power settings comment, when I get home I’m gonna test that and the graphics settings, just tinker with things to see if the suggestions I’ve gotten so far work. Switching distros will be my hail mary if all else fails.
Sounds good! Let us know how it goes ^^