Graphics Drivers / Mesa help AMD

[clammer]

Currently on Kubuntu 26.04 LTS , installed and only OS, Plasma 6.6.6

I'm on an AMD computer and having what I can only assume are graphics issues- I'm not sure exactly what caused them but I guess either I installed an update that wasn't ready or the program itself updated to become slightly incompatible. A theory I saw is that the graphics card could be dying, but I doubt it since it's fairly new and it only has problems in very specific cases. (I'd rather be optomistic anyway)

I'm getting occasional graphics issues from openGL renderers, and suddenly Deadlock's been stalling after only a couple of minutes of play. Those are the only things I've noticed having problems so far (but that second one could be out of my hands).

Anyway, I've been trying to fix it but I don't understand what to do. I've looked at other help topics and they imply I don't use AMD drivers? I downloaded the .deb from the official website in case I need it but haven't done anything else because these other topics have me confused. I ran glxinfo -B | grep "OpenGL" and Mesa is 26.0.8, which isn't up to date as I checked... running flatpak list | grep Mesa shows it should be 26.2.4 but running flatpak upgrade says "nothing to do." sudo apt upgrade didn't do anything as it was all up to date, allegedly. Also, checking drivers in GUI in driver manager shows "No additional drivers available."

From what I understand Mesa is, itself, a driver for AMD systems using Linux? How would I update it to hopefully fix my problems? Discover also doesn't have a pending Mesa update. Is there anything else I should be doing? Please help, thank you!

[claydoh]

Yes, mesa is the 3D graphics library set used by AMD and Intel graphics, it is not really a driver per se, but for all intents, we can consider it one.

(these libs also being in flathub/snap does make it more confusing -- but these provide a specific library version that a flatpak/snap app might require, so unless you are experiencing issues when using a flatpak or snap app specifically, we can ignore that for the moment)

So, some basics:
Which graphics card do you have?
How long has this been happening?
Can you be more specific about "graphics issues from openGL renderers?"


If this is mostly related to Steam games, have you tried using a different Proton version?
I see many manmy reports on gaming sources that this game frezzes or locks up for a lot of ppeople in recent months, tho most of that involves Nvidia and people on rollin distros


Mesa has not had an update since July, but there was a kernel update about two weeks ago. And there are Proton updates regularly as well.

First thing I'd try is to boot to a previous kernel at your Grub boot menu, and see if that has any effect.

[clammer]

I swapped to Linux 7.0.0-24 briefly and the issues still happened. if that wasn't what you meant by booting to a previous kernel, then I don't think I have that option.

The deadlock issue was happening literally with the latest patch, but it was set to openGL so I thought it was related. After swapping to vulkan it still happened so it could just be a game issue itself. Different proton versions I tried didn't help, but I didn't try all of them yet.

I'm using radeon RX 6600- The problem is very specific- I'm making a small game in Godot and opening an option in my in-game menu started causing bad sprite flickering. It didn't always do this and I didn't change anything in it, nor does the version matter. Changing the renderer off of openGL fixed the issue, but since I'm aiming for a web release it's the only option for when I export it. Also, this problem seems to only be on my end, I got a couple people to try it. I've been chasing this problem down for about a week now with no progress and I can't imagine what else it could be because everything else works. Updating Mesa seemed like the only possible fix.

You said "but these provide a specific library version that a flatpak/snap app might require," is that why mine is on 26.0.8 instead of 26.2.4? I shouldn't try to upgrade?

Also, I thought to test other games in the same engine- Cassette beasts is a godot game, no issues, but team fortress 2 crashed twice in quick succession with "Team Fortress 2 - Vulkan-64 bit" of tf-linux64 is not responding. Deadlock didn't give a crash error for whatever reason, but maybe it just means it's a source issue, but it could also be on my end because tf2 doesn't get big updates.