Does Forcing "High" DPM Performance Help Out Your AMDGPU Performance?

A premium patron recently asked about testing the open-source Radeon driver performance when testing the forced "high" dynamic power management state rather than the default "auto" mode. Here are some benchmarks.

This is about forcing /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level to high rather than auto, to ensure the GPU is bound to its highest performance state rather than dynamically changing performance states based upon load. Some have attributed this to greater performance, and while it may have in the past or with older hardware, I haven't really found it to be too beneficial for newer GPUs paired with recent kernel releases.

But as the request came in by a premium supporter, I ran some quick tests. Tests were done with a Linux 4.17 kernel and the common Radeon RX 580 graphics card.




Only in very select instances like Dota 2 with Vulkan did the forced high performance state make any difference with the RX 580 on this modern kernel.






All the data can be found here but long story short similar to other tests I have ran, with at least recent kernels on recent AMD GPU hardware, toggling power_dpm_force_performance_level hasn't really been found to be too useful over the default behavior. If you've encountered different outcomes, be sure to let us know the hardware and your results in the forums.