OK, so I tested the 4.4-rc4 kernel and all was well from what I could see with dmseg and steam. However, Dota 2 is REALLY slow while it worked well with the 4.3 kernel. Left 4 Dead 2 and regular usage seems fine. I am trying to bisect now but am running into compile issues while bisecting with Arch Linux. Here is my post that forum. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206660 I tested rc5, rc6, and now rc7 with no improvement. The 4.3.3 kernel that was updated in Arch Linux today works well.
System info Software versions: 4.4.0-rc7 OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 11.1.0 GPU hardware: OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD FIJI (DRM 3.1.0, LLVM 3.7.0) 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Fiji XT [Radeon R9 FURY X] [1002:7300] (rev c8) CPU hardware: x86_64 AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core Processor
It's not a regression, you'll need to get a kernel from drm-next (with amdgpu.powerplay=1 set) or a kernel from the powerplay branch in order to get your card to clock to its maximum frequencies during gaming. Equally you could wait for kernel 4.5-rc1 to be released
Then why I'd it playable with 4.3? I know there is no power management until 4.5
OK, I was finally able to bisect today and it looks like the culprit is... a7ca8ef93001eaab4c5c7f4f3accfbe6ffcf5f26 is the first bad commit commit a7ca8ef93001eaab4c5c7f4f3accfbe6ffcf5f26 Author: Flora Cui <Flora.Cui@amd.com> Date: Mon Nov 2 14:27:45 2015 +0800 drm/amdgpu: update Fiji's Golden setting Change-Id: Ic3f3bfce4767cc05d04f6eb24e22a0f3e7ceacaa Signed-off-by: Flora Cui <Flora.Cui@amd.com> Reviewed-by: Jammy Zhou <Jammy.Zhou@amd.com> :040000 040000 0a2e67919fcc78b23e7ab7b9fa5978666aeab8cd 62f5595003bf498122fcbc5b65e3d7213a9d1e5a M drivers
Well, it seems that things are much better with 4.4rc8! I'm not sure why. It could also be the new Mushkin RAM I installed. I was having a lot of other random issues with my G.Skill Ares kit like lots of build errors and random system freezes. I'll test this kernel out more this weekend.