Radeon Driver Power Management Has Room For Improvement

Another sensor being monitored by the Phoronix Test Suite was the CPU usage in each of the configurations. Worth noting the most is the CPU usage of the Catalyst driver compared to the open-source Radeon driver in any configuration. The CPU usage was much higher with the Radeon driver -- no matter the power-state -- compared to the Catalyst driver. For the Radeon HD 4550, the CPU usage when running the Catalyst driver was at 12%, which was half of where the Radeon driver was at using Gallium3D.

Here are the GPU core temperatures when running OpenArena. Next time prior to the tests commencing, I will ensure that aticonfig / OverDrive is reporting values correctly as it is unfortunate not to have the Catalyst operating temperature with these results. Aside from that, the numbers are as would be expected for this workload.