I’ve been using a tool called radeontop for years to monitor the performance and utilization of my AMD GPUs on Linux. It’s a TUI-based application that renders the value of different performance counters as bar charts:

A screenshot of the radeontop application. Shows several different bars rendered in a terminal in various colors with labels like Graphics pipe, Event Engine, Scan Converter, Clip Rectangle, and others.

For the most part, it does a good job and it provides a concise overview of GPU utilization.

However, it seems that radeontop is no longer actively developed/updated.

It’s received ~7 commits in the past ~3 years and although it does still mostly work even with the latest GPUs like the 7900 XTX, but it’s not under active development.

Enter amdgpu_top⌗

Today, I discovered an alternative tool that does all of the same things as radeontop and more: amdgpu_top. It’s actively developed with commits in the past couple of weeks at the time of writing this.

It is written in Rust, and so was extremely easy to install:

cargo install amdgpu_top

Here’s what its UI looks like:

A screenshot of the amdgpu_top TUI. Shows several bars tracking performance counters with names like Graphics Pipe, Shader Processor Interpolator, etc. It also has a list of processes and information about them including the amount of VRAM they’re using and GPU utilization percents for graphics, compute, DMA, and encoding/decoding. At the bottom, there is a sensors section with information about the clock rate of various GPU clocks, GPU temperature, and power.

As you can see, there’s a ton more data available! One immediate benefit is the process list which shows which processes are consuming what GPU resources. This is extremely useful and something I had no ability to see with radeontop.

The sensors view is also extremely useful. radeontop had no way to track GPU temperature, but here amdgpu_top provides that along with block rates, power metrics, and more.

For the displayed performance counters, I think they’re using the same underlying data with some differences in naming and grouping. I think that radeontop is slightly more granular with the performance counters, but I honestly have no idea what half of those counters even track so having a bit of a coarser view is actually beneficial to me.

GUI View⌗

Another big upgrade that amdgpu_top provides is a fully-fledged GUI application as an alternative to their default TUI view. It can be accessed by launching amdgpu_top --gui:

A screenshot of the amdgpu_top GUI. It shows a detailed set of metrics tracking GPU utilization and other statistics. There are utilization percentage displays and line charts plotting the history of all the recorded metrics with names like Graphics Pipe, Shader Processor Interpolator, etc. It also has a list of processes and information about them including the amount of VRAM they’re using and GPU utilization percents for graphics, compute, DMA, and encoding/decoding.

It’s quite dense, but that’s because it’s packed with so much information. Having the ability to track GPU utilization over time is a hugely useful feature, and as such I’ll probably end up using the GUI mode most often when I use amdgpu_top.

Conclusion⌗

So yeah, personally I see no way at all in which radeontop wins over amdgpu_top. amdgpu_top seems like a clear upgrade in every way, and I’ll not be looking back personally.

I’ll admit that as an avid Rust programmer, I’m slightly biased since amdgpu_top is written in Rust and radeontop is in C, but even besides that it’s just a better, more feature-rich, and modern tool.

If you’re interested in tracking performance for your AMD GPU, give amdgpu_top a try for sure!