[Development] AMD "Dynamic Boost"

So, I started developing a little service, based on AMD's Display Library (ADL) SDK ( mostly the overdrive 6 module), to emulate "Dynamic Boost" after being suggested on another thread.

Dynamic Boost means monitoring your temperature and FPS in order to check if we should/could push the card a bit more (by overclocking it) if the FPS are low and we have temperature headroom or, if on the other-hand, we have a very high FPS and we could slow down a bit (similar to v-sync, but with some advantages).

However, I noticed WHY something like this hasn't been developed before. Even though it is pretty simple!

You can easily access temperature, clocks, utilization, etc, and change those values on the fly with AMD's SDK. I also found that there is a minimum "step" in order to increment or decrease frequencies, as well as maximum and minimum hardcoded frequencies (this explains the behaviour of MSI Afterburner). However, when you do change it, you either get a quick flicker (adjusting memory frequency) or your FPS plummet for a second or two (adjusting core frequency). You can test this yourself: try running Kombustor and change your frequencies in MSI. Even when going from a lower frequency to a greater one, you will see what I mean. This makes my service completly useless, even if it occurs only every 10 seconds or so.

Apparently, with the new 8000 series, we will be capable of doing this on the fly. This seems to be a driver limitation, so we might be able to either get dynamic boost ourselves (via creating a service based on overdrive) or with a driver update (that gives that feature to us 7000 series users).

Anyway, thought I should share this finding. What do you guys think about this technology? Is it worth having? Think I should look into these things a wee bit more?

Cheers, and thanks for the challange :thumbsup:

 

so basically it is like nvidia's "GPU boost"?

 

yes, but this idea would also take into account the fps rates, thus its more like a combined gpu boost/adaptive vsync/powersaver

@OP:i didnt think ud actually go through with this after reading ur posts in that other thread! nice to see ure actually onto smth here

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

Thanks mate ^^. Just a little frustrated with the limitations of our current drivers. At least, I'm pretty certain that it is driver related (the issues when changing frequency on the fly). Kudos to AMD for making a decent SDK with adequate documentation. Perhaps it's a iGPU issue?

 

Looks like it is. Hopefully it won't follow Optimus=>Enduro example in terms of implementation quality. We don't need people wanting to disable Dynamic Boost in the future too.

 

This feature will probably be both hardware and driver based. The hardware part will help guarantee performance and that you have to shell out for newer cards to get the feature, and the driver component will help ensure flexibility (in case something goes wrong, like enduro). Hopefully, it is only driver based, meaning we could "shut it off" by modding the driver, and using this feature even in "unsupported" cards. Albeit being 100% driver based means some extra load for the CPU (not that much, IMO).

 

Flickering with clock speed changes been around since AMD had dynamic changing speeds. Its sad that they still can't get it right on mobile, seems to be fine on desktop since gpu boost is enabled on desktop cards. 5870M I had was worse, couldn't decide what was 2D and 3D, so it would constantly flicker. Had to force it into performance or power saving mode, no in between. Seripusly, never buying mobile AMD again. F them, can't fix this after 4 years?

 

You need to plug into their new overclocking mode since you can do it without flickering.

 

But even when it doesn't flicker, utilization drops (whenever increasing or decreasing core frequency) and framerate drops (albeit slightly) for a second or two. Hm, maybe I'm doing something wrong, or not taking something into account. Sigh.

 

The reason the new turbo modes are chipside rather than driver side is that it can respond much faster and do many more writes without tying up lots of requests/interrupts on the OS.

 

And, let's not forget, that you get to shell out a couple for a new card .

 

We will see on that Where we have identical chip usage you may be able to move your card to the new type.