Graphical delay, sound normal, AMD card

[Brian Alex]

I have been experiencing choppy, delayed graphics on Mint 22.3 fully updated. Even as I type this I have to wait brief moments to see the letters appear. In games it is intolerable. I pinged the source of one game and the readings were fine (Average 9 ms) but the display of the readings were being delayed by up to ~.5 seconds. I just clicked the link in "Anyone Like Classical" here and the sound is fine but the video pauses.

I have an AMD card (Radeon RX 460). Is there something that a beginner like me can do to identify and correct the cause of this? I just restarted the machine and it is back to normal so maybe it's not a big deal. I have had this on and off for some months.

 

[Condobloke]

What graphics card do you have, and where did the driver come from ?

 

[CaffeineAddict]

I just restarted the machine and it is back to normal

video can pause when you run low on RAM, please check your RAM usage.

 

[f33dm3bits]

That gpu only has 2GB vram.

AMD Radeon RX 640 Mobile Specs

AMD Polaris 23, 1218 MHz, 640 Cores, 40 TMUs, 16 ROPs, 2048 MB GDDR5, 1500 MHz, 64 bit

www.techpowerup.com

I would check how much vram your system is using with "nvtop", install it if it's not installed.

sudo apt install nvtop

 

[Brian Alex]

Sorry, I mis-typed. It's an RX 460 with 4G RAM. Also I did check the memory usage (8GB DDR3) and it is way below 40% during these events so I excluded lack of memory as a likely issue.

 

[Brian Alex]

I can't remember what driver I have. I recall that I had to get it with an APT command last year. Perhaps there is a newer one. I will look into that. Thanks CondoBloke.

I notice that there is a new driver for Ubuntu

"Radeon™ Software for Linux® version 26.13 for Ubuntu 24.04.4 HWE" released last week (7.20.2026)​

https://www.amd.com/en/support/download/linux-drivers.html​

Would that work on Mint 22.3? Thanks

 

[piorunz]

I can't remember what driver I have. I recall that I had to get it with an APT command last year. Perhaps there is a newer one. I will look into that. Thanks CondoBloke.

I notice that there is a new driver for Ubuntu

"Radeon™ Software for Linux® version 26.13 for Ubuntu 24.04.4 HWE" released last week (7.20.2026)​

https://www.amd.com/en/support/download/linux-drivers.html​

Would that work on Mint 22.3? Thanks

Mint does not require downloading any Radeon drivers.
After installing the system, adequate GPU driver will already be there.

I just restarted the machine and it is back to normal so maybe it's not a big deal.

It was just some temporary glitch. Don't worry about it.

 

[Condobloke]

Mint does not require downloading any Radeon drivers.
After installing the system, adequate GPU driver will already be there.

Correct
If you really want to check, click on menu,,then type in driver manager, allow it to scan.
It will put a result up . ...usually 'No Drivers Needed'

 

[osprey]

Sorry, I mis-typed. It's an RX 460 with 4G RAM. Also I did check the memory usage (8GB DDR3) and it is way below 40% during these events so I excluded lack of memory as a likely issue.

From that post it looks like the machine RAM is 8G, and video RAM of the graphics card is 4G, and the machine's memory usage at the time of the graphics delay is only about 40%. That suggests that memory is not the issue, as mentioned.

The question arises as to the other choke points.
A major one could be the cpu.
One can check the cpu frequency at the time of the delay with something like the following command in top:

$ top -cH1
top - 19:06:49 up  9:55,  1 user,  load average: 0.25, 0.52, 0.67
Threads: 1464 total, 1 running, 1462 sleep, 1 d-sleep, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu0  :  0.0 us,  2.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 98.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu1  :  0.3 us,  1.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 98.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu2  :  0.0 us,  1.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu3  :  0.3 us,  1.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 98.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu4  :  0.3 us,  3.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu5  :  0.0 us,  2.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 97.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu6  :  2.0 us,  7.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 90.5 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu7  :  0.0 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni,100.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu8  :  2.0 us,  1.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu9  :  0.3 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu10 :  0.0 us,  1.7 sy,  0.0 ni, 98.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.3 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu11 :  0.3 us,  3.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu12 :  0.0 us,  1.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu13 :  0.3 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu14 :  0.3 us,  0.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.3 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu15 :  0.0 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni,100.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu16 :  0.0 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni,100.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu17 :  0.3 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu18 :  0.3 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni, 99.7 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
%Cpu19 :  0.0 us,  0.0 sy,  0.0 ni,100.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  15629.1 total,   9246.8 free,   3086.0 used,   3783.9 buff/cache 
MiB Swap:  15259.0 total,  15259.0 free,      0.0 used.  12543.1 avail Mem

The meanings of the columns are as follows from the top man page:

 As  a default, percentages for these individual categories are displayed.
         us : time running un-niced user processes
         sy : time running kernel processes
         ni : time running niced user processes
         id : time spent in the kernel idle handler
         wa : time waiting for I/O completion
         hi : time spent servicing hardware interrupts
         si : time spent servicing software interrupts

If any, or a multiple number of the times are running at 100% or very close to it, that could account for delays.
In the above output, very little is happening

Another check worth considering is the cpu governor. One can check the current governor with the following command:

[~]$ cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 12:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 12
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 12
  energy performance preference: balance_performance
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 3.50 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 3.50 GHz.
                  The governor "powersave" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 1.05 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes

The governor in this output on this machine is "powersave" which is one of the two available governors. Games are better off with the performance governor, so one can change that for the current boot with the following command as root:

[root@min ~]# cpupower frequency-set --governor performance
Setting cpu: 0
Setting cpu: 1
Setting cpu: 2
Setting cpu: 3
Setting cpu: 4
Setting cpu: 5
Setting cpu: 6
Setting cpu: 7
Setting cpu: 8
Setting cpu: 9
Setting cpu: 10
Setting cpu: 11
Setting cpu: 12
Setting cpu: 13
Setting cpu: 14
Setting cpu: 15
Setting cpu: 16
Setting cpu: 17
Setting cpu: 18
Setting cpu: 19

Then check again to see which governor is running:

[root@min ~]# cpupower frequency-info
analyzing CPU 10:
  driver: intel_pstate
  CPUs which run at the same hardware frequency: 10
  CPUs which need to have their frequency coordinated by software: 10
  energy performance preference: performance
  hardware limits: 800 MHz - 4.80 GHz
  available cpufreq governors: performance powersave
  current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 4.80 GHz.
                  The governor "performance" may decide which speed to use
                  within this range.
  current CPU frequency: Unable to call hardware
  current CPU frequency: 4.59 GHz (asserted by call to kernel)
  boost state support:
    Supported: yes
    Active: yes

The output shows that the "performance" governor is now running. This can be made permanent, but for present purposes investigating the delay, one can just change the governor for the current boot and see if makes a difference.