The Importance Of The TUXEDO Driver Package On Their Newer Ryzen Laptops

As an important notice to those with new TUXEDO laptops such as the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 powered by the Ryzen 7 7840HS, installing their DKMS-based driver package can be very important if aiming to achieve maximum performance.

By default TUXEDO Computers ships with their TUXEDO OS platform that is derived from the current Ubuntu LTS releases and besides using the KDE Plasma desktop also has various changes like their nice TUXEDO Control Center user interface. As part of that the "tuxedo-drivers" packages is installed that provides some DKMS-based kernel modules for enhancing the support of their laptops.

If you aren't planning on running TUXEDO OS but some other platform or upstream Ubuntu, it can be important to install their driver packages anyhow -- even if the power/performance seems right.

In my initial Ryzen 7 7840HS testing with the Pusle 14 Gen 3 laptop it all seemed right and running great on Ubuntu Linux. Part of the cobfusion can arise though for parts such as that where there is the AMD Configurable TDP, in the case of the 7840HS is from 35 to 54 Watts. In my testing the 7840HS out-of-the-box on Ubuntu had a 30 Watt power draw and 54 Watt peak, so all seemed right.

After that TUXEDO Computers pointed out that their driver package is needed to properly set the peak platform profile. But that's not to be confused with the standardized ACPI Platform Profile behavior that is also exposed under Linux via various interfaces. Via the TUXEDO drivers package the "performance" profile can be set to allow for a sustained 45 Watt power draw and ensuring the full 54 Watt capacity of the Ryzen 7 7840HS is achieved.

The tuxedo-drivers package for Debian-based distributions or a generic .tar.gz package can be found here. When those drivers are installed, the TUXEDO-specific /sys/bus/platform/devices/tuxedo_platform_profile/platform_profile interface can be used for reading and setting the platform profile and the /sys/bus/platform/devices/tuxedo_platform_profile/platform_profile_choices interface for reading all available choices.

For those not wanting to rely on out-of-tree kernel modules or the like, hitting the FN + F3 (gauge icon) keyboard combination can also be used to cycle through the TUXEDO platform profiles but without any confirmation of the used platform profile or the like... So the kernel support is useful for not only setting your desired mode but also confirming it.

For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Ubuntu 23.10 out-of-the-box and then repeated it with the TUXEDO-Drivers package installed and in the performance mode. The raw performance and the CPU power consumption were monitored.