Firefox/YouTube (non full screen) - AMDgpu - X11/Plasma frequent micro-stutters - found a solution

Hi.

Since I upgraded my desktop a yr or so ago I’ve noticed videos have a constant small stutter, which is very annoying to watch - full screen is fine.

Specs:

AMD 7600x CPU
AMD 7800 XT GPU
ASROCK mother board (AM5)
RAM : DDR-6000 (EXPO)
X11

I was messing about with LACT the other day and noticed if you change the ‘power profile’ from

’BOOTUP_DEFAULT’ to ‘3D_FULL_SCREEN’ the issue goes away .

Hope this helps someone ..

Wayland is ok btw

Is there a better way of solving this ? (that doesn’t involve power profiles)

Use Plasma Wayland? I have no issues since I switched over a year+ ago.

It fixed all my stuttering and other issues.

There is just something better about the mouse movement in X11 (for games) compared to Wayland which is why I still use X11..

It was actually whilst I was investigating random crashes in games that I found this solution

(crashes occurred in both Wayland and X11 seemingly at any random time)

Using LACT I could see that by default the Max Clock speed was set to 2520. But my model -

https://www.sapphiretech.com/en/consumer/nitro-radeon-rx-7800-xt-16g-gddr6

Has Max ‘GPU: Boost Clock: Up to 2430 MHz’

Once I reduced this to 2400 , raised the low from 500 → 600 and enabled 3d_full_screen crashes completely stopped (like no crashes ever..) , and benchmarks actually showed faster speeds.

I had been tearing my hair out trying to work out why, I had disabled EXPO in RAM (to run at 4800 instead of 6000) and various things - but in the end this was the cause.

I have no issues in Wayland rather it fixed all my problems as I said.

Yeah this sounds more like a clock setting issue.