Trying Out The Experimental AMDGPU OverDrive Overclocking With The R9 Fury

Last week AMD published initial open-source OverDrive GPU overclocking support for their AMDGPU kernel driver, eight years after Catalyst on Linux got OverDrive support. This feature won't be mainlined until the Linux 4.8 kernel but allows for basic overclocking of the GPU core on Tonga / Fiji / Polaris hardware.

See that earlier article for more details on this AMDGPU OverDrive support. This weekend I also spun up an Ubuntu/Debian kernel of the Radeon/AMDGPU 4.8 WIP code but again be forewarned that this support is currently experimental, only allows changing the core clock speed for now, and is limited to supporting Tonga/Fiji/Polaris.

With the playing around I've done with the AMDGPU OD code on an R9 Fury (Fiji) graphics card, it's worked out without any major issues. The highest overclock I was able to achieve with my Sapphire Radeon R9 Fury was an 8% overclock to its core frequency -- anything higher would result in games locking up.




Over on OpenBenchmarking.org are a few benchmarks showing the AMDGPU R9 Fury performance when setting the pp_sclk_od to 8 relative to the stock performance on this open-source DRM driver.