Radeon DPM Is Fantastic For Power Use, Thermal Performance

With the GPU thermal and system power consumption monitoring, any Phoronix Test Suite user can carry out similar tests with any test profiles by simply setting the MONITOR=sys.power,gpu.temp environment variable. Unfortunately, the current Radeon DRM driver has no easy way via sysfs/debugfa for reading the real-time memory/core frequencies, so there's no graphs showing the real-time frequency scaling for this hardware (with supported drivers/hardware, the Phoronix Test Suite already can handle MONITOR=cpu.freq,gpu.freq to monitor the frequencies in real-time; run phoronix-test-suite system-sensors to see what is supported by your software/hardware).

Comparison benchmarks against the AMD Catalyst driver will come in due time. The boot speeds for these three AMD Radeon graphics cards were the rated maximum frequencies for the graphics cards, so there is no OpenGL performance improvement expected. However, the real interesting item is how Radeon DPM affects the power consumption and thermal performance of the discrete GPUs.

Any further test requests or questions about the testing process can be made by visiting the forums, contacting me, or tweeting @MichaelLarabel.