You Can Now Overclock Your Intel GPU Under Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 24 March 2013 at 03:51 PM EDT. 15 Comments
INTEL
The Intel Linux graphics driver should now work better when overclocking your Intel graphics core thanks to a new Linux kernel patch.

With a kernel patch done by Intel's Ben Widawsky to their DRM driver, a correction was made for Sandy Bridge and newer (Ivy Bridge, Haswell, etc) graphics cores to take care of a kernel driver bug that has been around for several months. With this patch that's now found in drm-intel-nightly and may make its way to stable kernel series, overclocking should work. Without the patch, Intel Turbo support is broken under Linux.

With a kernel bearing that Intel Turbo GPU support, overclocking of the Intel GPU core should be possible from the BIOS/UEFI of many enthusiast-grade Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge motherboards. For the motherboards that allow manipulating the GPU core's frequency and voltage, with Sandy Bridge and particularly Ivy Bridge the GPU can be pushed a whole lot faster.

More details on the Intel Linux GPU overclocking can be found on the blog of Intel's Daniel Vetter. Some Intel Linux GPU overclocking benchmark results will be published on Phoronix soon.

Unfortunately, this work isn't about any initiatives to make GPU overclocking easy from the Linux desktop with any user-space programs for manipulating Intel Turbo, overclocking, or other features.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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