The Current State Of Radeon Power Management

First, the Catalyst driver in the configuration tested had some driver issues with OpenArena, which is why the proprietary driver was underperforming compared to the default open-source driver. However, in terms of the open-source driver power impact on performance, that was interesting. Principally, using dynamic power management did not severely hinder the performance of OpenArena. The Radeon DRM driver was quick enough in upping the power/performance state that it matched that of the high power state (stock configuration). When the driver was in its lowest power state, the frame-rate for this ioquake3 game was still playable at 73 FPS, which is a third of the speed of the highest power state and roughly as expected with the low power frequency (250MHz) being just shy of a third of the highest power state (800MHz). The 500MHz (medium) performance level was also in line at 72% the performance of the highest power state.

The Catalyst driver was chewing through more of the CPU than any of the Radeon driver configurations.

And a look at how the Radeon HD 6950 GPU frequency was being controlled when using the Catalyst driver... It was much more dynamic than the open-source driver's dynamic power management mode that was usually running at the maximum speed.

The GPU temperature of the Radeon HD 6950 was also in line with expectations.

Moreover, the fence count for each of the open-source driver power management modes to reflect the GPU utilization.