Vernet’s patch instead monitors cores to look for situations where a busy thread would benefit from an improved clock rate. The patch then temporarily sets just that core to the “performance” setting until the workload slows enough to downshift back into energy-saving EPP mode.

The nitty-gritty implementation at a kernel level gets pretty complicated—read through Vernet’s write-up for all the details. But the worst-case performance improvements seem clear in early testing. Vernet’s testing on Civilization VI benchmarks saw a 31.8 percent improvement in the “1% low” fps measurement, and 4.1 percent faster p99 frame generation times (i.e., the point where 99 percent of frames are generated at least that quickly).

While this EPP adjustment doesn’t affect the average FPS measurements in Vernet’s benchmark, speeding up the slowest frames the game generates should help moderate the occasional jerky frame hitches that can occur when running a game in EPP mode.

We’ll likely have to wait for Vernet’s submitted patch to be integrated into the full AMD Linux kernel to see how the new feature fares on other common gaming benchmarks. Regardless, it’s nice to see that low-level Linux coding updates are still wringing some performance improvements from Valve’s quickly aging handheld hardware.