Testing The AMD Kaveri GPU Burst Turbo/Extreme

Offered through the UEFI interface on the ASUS A88X-PRO motherboard with the new AMD A10-7850K "Kaveri" APU is a "GPU Burst" mode with auto, turbo, and extreme settings. In this article this performance option for Kaveri's Radeon R7 Graphics is going to be tested under Ubuntu Linux.

This is the latest of already many AMD Kaveri Linux articles published on Phoronix since the chip's debut last week. This is just some straight-forward benchmarks to see how much of an impact the "GPU Burst" mode has on the A10-7850K's OpenGL gaming performance.

The ASUS motherboard by default has the value set to the "Auto" mode, which runs the GPU at its stock 720 MHz frequency. When setting the "Turbo" option the AMD Catalyst Linux driver was reporting a peak core frequency of 900 MHz, and under "Extreme" the peak frequency of the graphics core was 960MHz. During all of this testing the system memory was consistent at DDR3-2133MHz (in a separate article will be new benchmarks looking at the overall Kaveri DDR3 memory scaling performance).

The benchmarks from this GPU Burst mode comparison for the Kaveri APU on Ubuntu Linux with the Catalyst binary driver can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org from the Phoronix Test Suite produced results: 1401178-PL-KAVERI38901.

Hit up that link for all of the system details and results but the short synopsis is:
For many Linux OpenGL workloads it made little to no difference when under the "Turbo" or "Extreme" GPU modes for the A10-7850K.
GpuTest showed some best-case results when playing around with this ASUS UEFI motherboard option. Now check out the rest of the Linux performance data.