AMD Ryzen "Renoir" CPU Frequency Scaling Governor Performance

While the "performance" governor is generally recommended for Linux gamers in leading to the best performance, that is the case specifically when using a discrete graphics card. In the past Intel has recommended those using Intel HD/UHD/Iris Graphics potentially use ondemand or alternatives due to the CPU and graphics sharing the same power envelope. With being clock-happy on the CPU side can negatively impact the performance when gaming by lowering the GPU thermal/power envelope. With the tests on the Ryzen 5 4500U, we found that to also be the case. The default ondemand governor was not only faster than the "performance" governor, but for the OpenGL Tesseract game the fastest was actually "conservative" and then powersave in second place.

On a performance-per-Watt basis, the outcome is close.

Xonotic with low quality settings saw similar behavior where conservative led to the highest frame-rates.

But when pushing this open-source game harder, the performance governor came in first by a very narrow margin.

For workstation visualizations with Paraview, the "performance" governor fell back to last place while the other governors led to similar results.