Quite simply, if the opensource driver featured an "auto" profile would it provide longer battery life for a laptop as the Catalyst driver does?
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Opensource ATI radeon driver - battery - auto profile
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Originally posted by curaga View PostYes, it would give a longer battery life. Yes, it has one, but it's not the default, since it flickers.
There is an "auto" profile but it only switches power levels when the display is blanked due to inactivity.
Here are the relevent bits from the RadeonFeature page :
The "dynpm" method dynamically changes the clocks based on the number of pending fences, so performance is ramped up when running GPU intensive apps, and ramped down when the GPU is idle. The reclocking is attemped during vertical blanking periods, but due to the timing of the reclocking functions, doesn't not always complete in the blanking period, which can lead to flicker in the display. Due to this, dynpm only works when a single head is active.
The "profile" method exposes five profiles that can be selected from:
1."default"
2."auto"
3."low"
4."mid"
5."high"
Select the profile by echoing the selected profile to /sys/class/drm/card0/device/power_profile.
?"default" uses the default clocks and does not change the power state. This is the default behavior.
?"auto" selects between "mid" and "high" power states based on the whether the system is on battery power or not. The "low" power state are selected when the monitors are in the dpms off state.Test signature
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This article also states that kernel 3.7 is improving the opensource divers particularly nouveau .http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/11/20/...rver-features/
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Originally posted by Sayth View PostSo the improvement of auto In dynpm will improve battery. Are there other features in development that will extend battery life and allow me to give Catalyst the boot?
As for me I ended up making few scripts toggling profiles. Because... because automatic management isn't in good shape at all. For example, auto and dynpm only cycles between "mid" and "high" states on my GPU. And GPU could be quite power hungry at mid state (for my GPU mid is 4x higher clock than low!)
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This phoronix article shows that there are some nice improvements on 3.7 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTE5Nzg
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