Intel P-State vs. CPUFreq Frequency Scaling Performance On The Linux 5.0 Kernel

First up are a number of the Linux gaming benchmarks to see the impact there with these drivers/governors on Linux 5.0.

With the newer Warhammer II Linux port, there wasn't a whole lot of difference in performance except when testing CPUFreq with powersave led to much lower performance. CPUFreq and P-State with the performance governor performed about the same and were the fastest, to no surprise.

Rise of the Tomb Raider also didn't see much difference in performance except when opting for CPUFreq powersave. Keep in mind the default on most Linux distributions is P-State powersave, which for the most part in these gaming tests so far performed right up at the top, not to be confused with CPUFreq powersave that is far from ideal.

The rather lightweight Dota 2 game with its Vulkan renderer did see some impact with the different governors/drivers with the GPU not being kept 100% busy during this benchmark. P-State was performing great with both its governors and in line with CPUFreq performance. CPUFreq ondemand and schedutil led to slightly lower performance while CPUFreq powersave was still as slow as molasses for Linux gaming.

On a performance-per-Watt basis, P-State with its performance governor yielded the best power efficiency.

F1 2018 was also tested as a Steam Play title with DXVK. here CPUFreq powersave was horribly slow while the other tested options didn't influence the frame-rates all that much.

The Tesseract open-source OpenGL game did see some variation in performance while the P-State/CPUFreq performance came out on top.

The P-State options and CPUFreq performance still though led to the best performance-per-Watt.