P-State/CPUFreq Governor Tests With Linux 4.12 For OpenGL/Vulkan Games

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 26 June 2017 at 12:12 PM EDT. Page 1 of 6. 6 Comments.

For those wondering about the impact on gaming of the different CPUFreq vs. P-State CPU frequency scaling drivers and their different governors, here are some fresh tests using an Intel Skylake CPU with Radeon RX Polaris graphics when using the latest Linux 4.12 kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev.

We routinely run these CPUFreq/P-State comparisons and overall have found the Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver to be maturing, but still not yet in a 100% ideal state. Each kernel release though does seem to improve P-State for helping modern Intel CPUs perform more admirably, especially with many Linux distributions defaulting to the Intel P-State Powersave combination for Sandy Bridge hardware and newer.

For this testing today are Linux gaming benchmarks with P-State's powersave and performance governors and then switching over to ACPI CPUFreq and testing ondemand, performance, schedutil, and conservative. All other settings remained the same throughout the entire testing process.

All tests were done on the Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 + Radeon RX 470 box for this comparison. With some of our governor comparisons I also do performance-per/Watt / power consumption metrics, but with my WattsUp Pro being busy this weekend on another box, this is just looking at the raw gaming performance. Similar AMD Ryzen tests with Linux 4.12 + Mesa 17.2-dev are being done as well for publishing in the next few days.


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