Previewing The Radeon DPM Performance On Linux 3.11
Due to the clock speed differences between what's set by default at boot time and now what the GPU is able to actually clock to (840MHz), upgrading the Linux kernel leads to the better part of a 3x performance improvement over the current stable state of the open-source Radeon driver.
The AMD Catalyst driver has already long offered dynamic re-clocking support for attaining maximum performance.