Lakka - Selecting different GPU for better performance

Libretro Lakka
#1

Hey everyone! First of all, apologies if I have missed any etiquette around what to provide when posting a troubleshooting post.

I have a 2019-ish ryzen 5 laptop with both vega integrated graphics and an nvidia gtx1650 dedicated chip. I have installed Lakka OS generic pc version x86_64-4.1 with the purpose of using PCSX2. Upon loading a PS2 ROM, the performance is choppy and poor.I’m guessing the iGPU is not powerful enough for PCSX2. I’ve changed over to vulkan and can see that there is a GPU selector, which only sees the Vega 8 iGPU.

I’m guessing upon boot, the OS is loading the amdgpu drivers and not nvidia. Do i need to blacklist the iGPU somehow? or is there a method in the GUI to select a different gpu?

Lakka:~ # lspci -nnk | grep -A 3 VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation TU117M [GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q] [10de:1f91] (rev ff)
	Kernel driver in use: nouveau
	Kernel modules: nouveau
01:00.1 Audio device [0403]: NVIDIA Corporation Device [10de:10fa] (rev ff)
--
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Picasso [1002:15d8] (rev c2)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Picasso [1043:18f1]
	Kernel driver in use: amdgpu
05:00.2 Encryption controller [1080]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 10h-1fh) Platform Security Processor [1022:15df]

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Thank you in advanced for an help you can provide. If you need any further information, please advise me how to obtain it and I’ll set about getting it for you :slight_smile:

Thanks,

Andrew

#2

Hi Andrew, unfortunately, as we use nouveau as driver for Nvidia GPUs, and there is no vulkan driver for Nvidia in Mesa, it’s currently not possible to use vulkan on Nvidia GPUs with Lakka.

#3

Can I load the Nvidia driver and chip with GL maybe? Is there a method of blacklisting the Vega iGPU so it defaults to using the Nvidia nouveau driver?

#4

That should be doable via your firmware/bios/UEFI settings.

#5

Thank you for your responses.

Could this be done at the software level? My laptop bios has no option to disable the iGPU. From what I have found online about LibreELEC, a blacklist.conf file located at /etc/modprobeld/ with the content “blacklist amdgpu” written inside the file could work, but this does not seem to have made a difference in my case.

Does Lakka have an option to software blacklist the iGPU? and if so, have I done it in the correct location/with the correct file and code?

Thanks,

Andrew

#6

In laptops with AMD/Intel dual graphics in the past this used to be able to be done from within the graphics driver.

I’m not sure if it could have been done on nVIDIA Optimus laptops as well but from what I’ve read it was completely automatic.

You can try hooking up an external display to your laptop and see if that happens to be connected to your nVIDIA GPU. Also, look through your display driver settings and see if there’s a way to use performance mode for different games or apps.

This might be a setting that’s in the Windows software package for the laptop but not necessarily included or supported by the Lakka or Linux in general. Can you install official nVIDIA drivers in Lakka?

#7

@Cyber, Running the HDMI out to the TV from boot present’s the same performance results. So either the 4G 1650 GPU is underpowered, or Lakka isn’t picking the chip for video processing. If installing the proprietary driver from Nvidia can be done, it’s likely way out of my skill league unless I harass the developers for guides on how to do this (not something I wish to impose on the team).

I’m thinking with today’s current build of Lakka, it’s a bad combination of my specific laptop and Lakka (not to diss Lakka, it looks really good and from what I’ve played around with, I like it a lot! Great job team!). @vudiq did mention that using Vulkan on Nvidia is “Currently” not available due to the specific driver used, suggesting that maybe Vulkan support with Nvidia chips might be seen in the future?

For now, I might give Ubuntu Kiosk mode running Retroarch a try. I’ll try “pci-stubbing” the igpu at grub and see if I can get better for a similar performance to Lakka. This should ultimately tell me if it’s my laptop hardware that’s lacking or Lakka’s current support for my specific oddball use case.

1 Like
#8

What about running Ubuntu or another distro, maybe Steam OS and trying the proprietary drivers then? Or perhaps using Windows with LaunchBox or BigBox?

While you’re fiiddling around trying to get things to work that may not ever want to work, there’s a whole world of emulation, nice front ends and excellent CRT and realtime reflection emulation just waiting to take advantage of that GTX 1650!