Meta Engineer's Linux Patches For Boosting AMD P-State / Steam Deck Gaming Performance

Back in July I wrote about AMD P-State driver patches boosting 1%-low frame rates for gaming by as much as 31%. That work was done by David Vernet who is a Linux kernel engineer/hacker at Mesa. This week Vernet presented on the topic at the Linux Plumbers Conference happening in Prague. Vernet presented on the work yesterday that establishes a per-CPU Energy Performance Preference (EPP) boost heuristic for recently busy CPU cores. This provides for better gaming performance on the likes of the Steam Deck and other AMD powered systems than the stock EPP behavior with the AMD P-State driver as it concerns frame-time tails and load times. That code review process on this summer's original patches though suggested making it a governor-level mechanism and not a driver heuristic as well as making some other design changes. The new proposal is to let a dynamic governor driver the EPP. The idea is also being thought about of having thread hints with the likes of Wine / Proton setting thread hints. The results shared by Vernet are quite promising for power and performance. Those wanting to learn more can see the presentation assets at lpc.events.