I’m relatively new to Unreal Engine and currently learning the ropes on Linux. I’ve hit a roadblock with a severe viewport rendering issue where meshes turn pitch black, disappear, or flicker when looking around the scene.
Looking straight up at the sky is completely stable, but as soon as I look at the village structures, the frame rate tanks and geometry breaks apart.
This issue persists across multiple maps and view modes (including Unlit and Base Color buffer visualization).
System Specs & Environment:
OS: CachyOS (Arch-based Linux, KDE Wayland) GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6600 Engine Version: Unreal Engine 5.8 (installed and launched via Asset Manager Studio)
Video of it happening:
Some things AI suggested but didn’t help:
Console commands: r.Nanite 0, r.Shadow.Virtual.Enable 0, r.DistanceFields 0, r.AllowOcclusionQueries 0, r.VirtualTextures 0 – none of these resolved the black/missing meshes.
Verified in Unlit / Base Color view modes – the geometry remains broken and black.
Attempted switching TargetedRHIs to SF_VULKAN_SM5 in DefaultEngine.ini, but the engine prompts that Nanite/VSM assets require SM6 and refuses to render properly.
Cleared DerivedDataCache, Saved, Intermediate, and Mesa shader cache.
this is the classic RADV plus UE editor swapchain loop. the “outdated swapchain” spam means the present engine keeps recreating the swapchain instead of acquiring images from it, and every recreation stalls frames in flight, which is why meshes flicker or render black while the camera moves. it is almost certainly not your scene.
work through these in order:
update mesa first. RADV gets unreal specific fixes constantly, and plenty of distros ship mesa builds that are months behind. a current mesa fixes a large share of these on navi cards.
A/B the heavy features: turn off lumen and nanite in project settings for one test run. both lean on vulkan features RADV implements differently from amd’s windows driver, and lumen especially triggers exactly this black flicker pattern on cards without hardware ray tracing. if the scene stabilizes, keep them off for editor work and switch the GI method to screen space for now.
present mode: run windowed instead of exclusive fullscreen and set r.vsync off for the test. constant swapchain recreation often comes from mode switching, and windowed mode sidesteps it.
if it still misbehaves, try the amdvlk driver instead of RADV, it sidesteps mesa’s codepath entirely. between a current mesa and amdvlk, most people on a 6600 get the editor stable.