AMD RDNA2 "Duty Cycle Scaling" Will Turn Off The GPU Under Heavy Load For Relief

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD RDNA2 "Duty Cycle Scaling" Will Turn Off The GPU Under Heavy Load For Relief

A new Radeon power management feature with RDNA2 graphics processors being exposed by the open-source Linux driver is Duty Cycle Scaling in the name of power/thermal management with a focus on low-power hardware...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMDGPU-Duty-Cycle-Scaling

[f0rmat]

This is interesting...a novel approach - throttle the system in order to reduce the heat/power envelope in order to create a more efficient processing that will ultimately complete the required task faster while reducing power requirements. At least that is how I read it - and I could be wrong. Could be useful on laptops. It would be interesting to see what the performance/power ratio benchmarks are - especially on desktops where battery life is not a concern.

[gfunk]

I'm thinking if this happened you would still have an image on your screen, is that not handled by the GPU?

[cb88]

I'm thinking if this happened you would still have an image on your screen, is that not handled by the GPU?

It's handled by the display output hardware, not the GPU core itself which is what they are refering to... and they would be powering it back up to render the next frame. The whole GPU core and maybe even part of the memory could be turned off... and by turned off this probably means power gated such that you only have static power and not dynamic power (static power is the power required to maintain state, its very low).

[gfunk]

It's handled by the display output hardware, not the GPU core itself

Thanks for the info. Does windows already do this? I always feel when my gaming rig is running non-gaming tasks there is wasted power being drawn from the video card

[xnor]

Thanks for the info. Does windows already do this? I always feel when my gaming rig is running non-gaming tasks there is wasted power being drawn from the video card

Any modern GPU and driver will lower clocks drastically on the desktop if there are no applications running that request high performance. This of course assumes that in the driver you configured your application profiles correctly.
This is also fairly easy to monitor as there are several good and free tools, though even something as simple as monitoring GPU load (which will be higher for the same tasks when the GPU is clocked down) suffices.

[droidhacker]

So, this is like thermal throttling on a cellphone, except that it doesn't just slow it down to a crawl, it can shut it right off.