Tool for under- and over-clocking radeon cards

[Daniel Bonniot]

Hi,

I wrote a user-space tool to control radeon cards (in particular change the 
clock speeds) under linux and possibly other Unix-like systems.

The code is heavily borrowed from two previous programs:
   radeon_dump (by Hui Yu <hyu at ati.com>, with authorization)
   r6setclk (by Vahur Sinijärv, for Windows, under GPL)
I put it together, implemented
the full automatic detection of all card parameters, and wrote the
main program. Many thanks also go to Aapo Tahkola who started the
conversion of r6setclk to unix, and to Roland Scheidegger who
helpfully provided links and information that enabled me to get this
program working.

The source is available at http://gna.org/projects/radeon-control/ and 
distributed under the GPL.

At this point, you need to get the source for the subversion repository. 
Compile with simply 'make', and the binary will be in src/. Comments and 
contributions are welcome.

I have tested this tool with a Radeon Mobility 9600 M10 card with 128MB,
but it should work with the whole Radeon family.

THIS PROGRAM COMMUNICATES WITH THE CARD AT VERY LOW LEVEL, SO IT
MIGHT POTENTIALLY DAMAGE YOUR HARDWARE. USE WITH CAUTION!

My initial goal was to experiment with underclocking to save power and heat on 
my Mobility M10 card (although I suppose many people will want to overclock).
My initial mesurement showed that vastly underclocking (from the default 
350/200 MHz to 100/100 MHz) did make a noticable difference on an idle machine 
(from 960 mA to 910 mA for the whole machine, and the disk was spinning). That 
was in single user mode, text mode, to make the mesurement more dependable. 
Hopefully I will one day find time to make more mesurements. I'm interested to 
hear about other people experience, and if anybody knows a way to probe 
radeons' temperature.

As far as I understand, PowerPlay is not supported on linux (neither xorg nor 
fglrx), only dynamic clocking. Maybe with PowerPlay the underclocking would 
become unnecessary, but I guess overclocking would still be interesting to 
gamers...

Enjoy,

Daniel