AMD Delivers OverDrive Overclocking Support For AMDGPU DRM Driver

AMD has published patches today for the AMDGPU Linux kernel DRM driver that finally make it possible to overclock the GPU when using the open-source driver.

Developers at AMD have made public a set of six patches for providing initial OverDrive support for the graphics engine on the AMDGPU DRM driver. This set of patches enable overclocking the GPU core by up to 20% in 1% increments.

While OverDrive has been around for a while, this OD implementation is just for AMDGPU and currently supports Tonga, Fiji, and Polaris hardware.

Utilizing OverDrive with the AMDGPU DRM driver isn't too user-friendly with having to write your desired (integer) percentage between 0 and 20 to the new pp_sclk_od sysfs entry that will appear when using a patched kernel. You can also read from this pp_sclk_od file for finding out the percentage of your current overclock.

More details via this patch series. It might be too late to see this OverDrive support land for Linux 4.7, but anyhow will work on patching a kernel build this weekend and running some benchmarks!