More than 10 years ago, Valve Corporation's Steam first saw the light of day as a gaming platform for Linux. Following this biggish bang, the free Linux operating system started to gain the attention of gamers. Thanks to Steam and its Proton Windows emulation layer, the selection of well-known game titles has grown steadily since then, with many top titles now released simultaneously for Windows and Linux.

Experience and benchmarks show that some games even run faster on Linux than on Windows thanks to the Proton runtime environment maintained by Valve and the modern Vulkan graphics API. The constant improvements to Linux driver support for graphics chips and technologies play a significant role here. These technologies include Deep Learning Super Sample (DLSS) [1], NVIDIA's real-time upscaling technology for computer games, and FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) [2], AMD's counterpart DLSS for upscaling and frame rate enhancement.

In most cases, even more improvements are possible: Optimally configured drivers tweak a few more frames per second out of the available graphics hardware. AI frameworks and renderers such as Blender also benefit from this: They also tend to use powerful GPU shaders for floating-point arithmetic because they handle the task more efficiently than the CPU.

Two smart tools for Linux, CoreCtrl and RadeonTop, let you take a look at the utilization of AMD GPUs. And if you have state-of-the-art hardware and a recent kernel version, you can even boost the performance of the chip or graphics card.

CoreCtrl

CoreCtrl [3] is a free program aimed specifically at GPUs and graphics chips by AMD. With just a few clicks, you can call up performance profiles for various scenarios on the desktop. The relatively new project can already be found in the software sources of some popular distributions. On Ubuntu starting in version 24.04, Fedora version 39 or later, Debian "Sid," Arch Linux, and Gentoo, you can install CoreCtrl quickly using the built-in package managers. CoreCtrl's GitLab website also has an external repository (PPA) for Ubuntu with the latest releases of the tool.

If CoreCtrl finds a supported AMD graphics chip in your system, it will display a window with two tabs at the bottom after launching. By default, you will see a global performance profile in the PROFILES tab, while SYSTEM shows you detailed hardware information for AMD chips. Clicking on one of the hardware components displays tiles with information below the control bar. The active component is highlighted in red in the control bar (Figure 1). The Software tab lists the Linux kernel version as well as the version of the important Mesa graphics library. Version details for OpenGL and Vulkan and the graphics cards' IDs round off the collection of information.

Figure 1: At a glance, CoreCtrl displays the CPU and GPU specifications in tiles.

Profiles

A customized profile can help you tweak the performance of AMD GPUs and CPUs based on the clock frequency; this means that you can keep the fan noise down if you want to concentrate on your work or go for maximum performance if noise isn't an issue. To do this, click on PROFILES to enable the settings for a Global Profile. The monitoring view that is then displayed shows the utilization of the individual AMD components. CoreCtrl provides information on the current load and clock speed for the CPU; plus the clock speed, bandwidth, and memory utilization for GPUs; and the temperature and fan speed for graphics cards (Figure 2).

Figure 2: GPU and CPU: The monitoring view displays critical performance data for AMD chips.

Depending on the CPU and GPU types, CoreCtrl will show you the configuration options available for fine-tuning. For example, there are usually options for power management, plus today's AMD graphics cards support fan control. Many newer AMD graphics chips let you tweak the maximum performance. Fan speed curves can be specified for graphics cards as a function of the temperature. After modifying the parameters, don't forget to press the Apply button. If you want to make the changes permanent, you also need to press Save.

To create your own profile, click on the plus sign in the top right-hand corner of the application profile window. A dialog opens to let you type a name for the new profile; you can then make this the default profile if so desired. As soon as you press OK to confirm, CoreCtrl transfers the profile to a list in the main window, where you can click to open a configuration dialog with the available settings. You can save the changes by pressing the Apply button top right.

If a profile you created manually does not have the desired effect on performance, simply call Restore to restore the previous default settings. You can press Save to save the individual settings in the profile permanently if desired.

Clockwork

In many cases, CoreCtrl lets you overclock graphics processors. Whether the hardware is suitable for this can quickly be determined. The corresponding settings dialog is simply not displayed for graphics processors not intended for overclocking by the AMDGPU kernel driver. But if overclocking is possible, you can use the controls to specify a performance mode for the GPU and manipulate the clock speed of the graphics memory.

As always, it's important to keep an eye on the temperature of the GPU or graphics card during overclocking and to up the fan speed to match. Also, overclocked components require more power from the existing power supply unit; it will need to have sufficient power in reserve to support overclocking.