It looks like for the upcoming [1]Linux 6.13 kernel cycle there could be a nice performance boost for AMD Radeon discrete graphics cards with the AMDGPU kernel driver poised to set more aggressive power heuristics by default.

A change queued up last week by AMDGPU driver maintainer Alex Deucher will now default to the fullscreen 3D workload profile for discrete GPUs. AMD APUs with integrated graphics will continue to use the default "bootup" power profile but discrete graphics cards will be running in the "fullscreen 3D" power profile by default.

Deucher commented on [2]the patch making this change:

"This uses more aggressive hueristics than the the bootup default profile. On windows the OS has a special fullscreen 3D mode where this is used. Since we don't have the equivalent on Linux default to this profile for dGPUs."

Since Linux lacks the infrastructure for properly and reliably indicating if a full-screen 3D game is running versus another application, this change will just use the full-screen 3D power profile at boot time by default. It's better in the name of performance but with more aggressive ramping of the core/memory clock frequencies it can come with an increase to power use by default.

In turn this change closes [3]this three year old bug report over power-savings being too aggressive on a Radeon RX 6800 and leading to stuttering. It also is set to close [4]this more recent bug report over RDNA3 power management / clock speeds being too low.

So barring any changes, this patch for applying the full-screen 3D power profile by default for AMD discrete GPUs will likely be merged for the Linux 6.13 kernel.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.13

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/agd5f/linux/-/commit/336568de918e08c825b3b1cbe2ec809f2fc26d94

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/1500

[4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3618