Ryzen 7 CPUFreq Governor Comparison For Linux Gaming On 4.12

A few days back I posted some fresh P-State and CPUFreq governor tests on Intel hardware while now is a similar comparison on the AMD side with a Ryzen 7 1800X processor and Radeon R9 Fury graphics card.

This testing was done using the Linux 4.12 Git kernel for the latest look at the ACPI CPUFreq driver performance when trying the different governor options for Ryzen: ondemand, performance, schedutil, conservative, and powersave. Obviously Intel's P-State driver isn't supported on Ryzen and there isn't any other AMD performance state / CPU frequency scaling driver at this time for Ryzen on Linux. CPUFreq Ondemand is the default for AMD CPUs on Ubuntu and most other Linux distributions for this hardware.

The tests in this article are just looking at the change in performance for various OpenGL/Vulkan Linux games when changing the CPUFreq governor for this high-end AMD system. The R9 Fury was using Mesa 17.2-dev built against LLVM 5.0 via the Padoka PPA for its RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan support. In some of my governor articles I also do power consumption / performance-per-Watt tests, but for the gaming comparisons, it really comes down to maximum frame-rates (and my lone WattsUp meter having been busy on another system).

All of these benchmarks were facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.