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

Dota 2 with OpenGL at 1440p sees a small difference in performance. Going from powersave (or ondemand, with CPUFreq) to performance does still yield some nice advantages for gamers, but not by the margins we once saw. For CPUFreq between performance and the new schedutil governor that makes use of the kernel's scheduler utilization data there didn't end up being any real difference for this particular game test.

When switching over to Vulkan with Dota 2, there was a 28% difference in performance moving from P-State powersave to performance, while CPUFreq Ondemand for this Skylake system was slightly faster than P-State powersave.

Dawn of War III by Feral Interactive meanwhile doesn't see much of a difference between the different governor options. Feral Interactive had mentioned previously they added a workaround to ensure proper behavior regardless of governor.

With Dawn of War III on Vulkan, the key driver/governor combinations performed as expected while the schedutil governor saw a big performance loss and the conservative governor came in last.

Similar data when running Dow3 at 1440p rather than 1080p.