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]

UPDATE:

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.

2nd UPDATE:

Potential success! BananaTrifleViolin asked if the games were running in 4k, which I made sure they weren’t. But then I got to thinking about my main desktop display. It defaulted to my TV’s 4k size, and the game was running in full screen…

So I fixed that and launched Hi-Fi again to test, and managed to get a stable 30fps! Now to figure out how to make this better, lol

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    7 hours ago

    I have the same device and have had no issues with drivers or games. I also wiped Win 11 and have Linux on there.

    I started with Nobara and it worked immediately and been running with that for nearly 18 months. I have recently (as in this week) switched to OpenSuSE after my Nobara install had issues, and again gaming is fine.

    I’m not sure about Mint or Kubuntu but I can’t see why either would have issues. The drivers should be within the kernel; I haven’t needed separate drivers. I used KDE on both Nobara and on OpenSUSE without issue.

    As you’ve experienced, I been impressed with the level the graphics can get to. Largely medium settings at 1080p for many games. I have played Cyberpunk 2077 on this on a mix of low to medium settings.

    This may be too basic question but you’re not playing games at 4k are you? The desktop can be at 4k but the games need to be set to less. You should be able to play 3D games on it, and I’d expect Yakuza Zero to play fine. The device is good with a 4k desktop and 4k video, but 4k 3D games is way more of an ask and you need to bring games down to 1080 (or even 720p if you want to push up some of the other game options).

    EDIT: BTW if you have a gaming desktop you can stream games to this miniPC in 4k. I switched to playing Cyperpunk via steam streaming and it looked incredible.

    EDIT2: One thing that is generally important is to install gstreamer and available codecs. They categorise them as “Good”, “Bad” and “Ugly”. Often the “good” category codecs are installed but sometimes the more proprietary codes in the “ugly” category are not (they are “Ugly” due to their licenses but are still excellent quality). I don’t believe it makes a difference to gaming but I certainly noticed issues with video. OpenSuSE doesn’t install proprietary codecs by default. Nobara did (I think) but I’m not sure about Mint and Kubuntu’s approachs.

    EDIT 3: Just wanted to highlight another important point mentioned elsewhere in this thread by [email protected]. KDE defaults to balanced power mode for me and that certainly does impact the GPU performance. You need to change it to Performance mode in the power settings. That can either be done from the “Power and Battery” area in the task tray or in the “Power Management” section of the KDE Settings app (near the bottom of the list in the “System” group).