RX 6950XT - poor game performance
Drop your DE’s display refresh rate down a notch.
This is a note I made years ago when I first built my current PC. I noticed that in any remotely graphically intensive game, even older ones like Fallout 4, performance was awful. We’re talking 20fps awful. A 6950XT can definitely do better than that.
In effect, it seems that there is/was a bug in the AMD GPU driver, Wayland, the kernel, an interaction between them all or something that causes the GPU to stay in a low-power state even when it should scale up for the demanding work when used with a higher refresh-rate monitor.
I tried to find a way to squeeze a pun in here, but can think of nothing for a high-refresh rate minotaur, but there’s definitely something there.
Fortunately the fix is simple, though with a drawback. My monitor is 144Hz, and set to 144Hz I get this low performance issue. Set it to 120Hz however, and performance is great. Note that this definitely isn’t improving performance by making the GPU do less. This relatively small refresh-rate change takes our 20fps from earlier, and puts us where we should be at closer to 100fps.