AMD Ryzen 9 9950X Power/Performance With CPU Frequency Scaling Driver Tunables
First up was the GravityMark demanding graphics benchmark... Not interesting from the performance perspective when taxing the GPU heavily.
But it becomes very interesting when looking at the difference the CPU frequency driver settings have on the CPU power consumption. In the default mode of operation on Ubuntu Linux the Ryzen 9 9950X was consuming 35 Watts but when switching to the EPP performance it shot up to a 44 Watt average or 50 Watt average with the performance governor. The out-of-the-box power use with the amd-pstate-epp powersave is also noticeably better than using the ACPI CPUFreq driver with Schedutil, the prior default up until a few kernel releases ago when AMD P-State was declared stable enough for Ryzen CPUs (Zen 2 and newer with ACPI CPPC).
On a performnace-per-Watt basis the amd-pstate-epp powersave easily wins for GravityMark.
For not all graphics workloads did the CPU frequency scaling settings make a big difference.
GPUScore was another demanding benchmark where the CPU frequency scaling driver / settings could mean the difference of the CPU consuming 35 Watts or 50 Watts on average while encountering the same level of graphics performance.
Meanwhile for most of the demanding system benchmarks there wasn't much of a difference in manipulating the CPUFreq driver/settings on the Ryzen 9 9950X.