AMD has responded to the ongoing issue of its Zen 5, Zen 4, and even Zen 3 CPUs having lower performance in Windows when users aren’t logged in with an admin account, suggesting a fix is coming soon. The AMD Ryzen Windows bug fix should see users of many recent AMD Ryzen processors getting a slight performance boost if they’re still using a standard user account, rather than an admin account.
The Windows 11 Ryzen performance problems are affecting some of the best gaming CPUs you can buy, with a discrepancy of as much as 8% being seen between tests run with different types of Windows user accounts. AMD has stated it’s working with Microsoft to issue a fix, though, with a pre-release version of Windows 11 already including the change.
The problem besetting AMD’s CPUs is one that was only really picked up during benchmarking for reviews of the company’s latest Ryzen 9000 CPUs (that use the new Zen 5 architecture), such as the Ryzen 9950X and Ryzen 9900X, but has since been seen to affect its older Ryzen 7000 (Zen 4) and Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) chips too. It manifests as simply lower average frame rates in games.
Not all games are affected but some can see as much as an 8% performance drop if using a non-admin account, with some testers seeing an average of a 4% drop across a wide range of games, with the new chips often performing little better than their Zen 4 predecessors. Performance drops were then also spotted in Zen 4 and Zen 3 chips, though the drops were generally less extreme than the Zen 5 CPUs. This is all in stark contrast to AMD’s claims an average 9% performance increase for Zen 5 over Zen 4.
In response to questions from Kitguru about the issue, AMD stated that during its internal testing it “showed a 9% average generational uplift” for the new CPUs compared to Zen 4 models. However, it notes that “Not all reviews are seeing these results” and “there are several factors specifically creating these differences.” It goes on to list these three factors:
- The AMD gaming test suite includes a broad set of esports, AAA, and popular older games, which are a combination of CPU- and GPU-bound titles. Game performance conclusions can be influenced significantly by the makeup of the test suite.
- AMD tested Intel configurations using comparable DDR5-6000 memory as well as Intel default settings-baseline power profile which can have a small impact on gaming performance.
- AMD also tests with Windows Virtualization-based Security (VBS) enabled. This is the default Windows behavior and Microsoft recommends activating VBS to improve security, however it can affect gaming performance.
Crucially, the company then goes on to note the core reason for the discrepancy. It states that:
“The ‘Zen 5’ architecture incorporates a wider branch prediction capacity than prior ‘Zen’ generations. Our automated test methodology was run in ‘Admin’ mode which produced results that reflect branch prediction code optimizations not present in the version of Windows some reviewers used to test Ryzen 9000 Series.”
The upshot is that there’s already a pre-release version of Windows 11 that resolves these issues and that’s available to users of Microsoft’s Windows Insider program. The latest 24H2 release is shown by AMD to deliver an average of 4.8% performance improvement across a range of apps and games, essentially fixing the issue.
It’s not clear when the new version of Windows 11 will see a general public release as a Windows Update but rumors suggest it may be around November 2024. That means there could be a little bit of a wait for AMD CPU users to get this fix, but thankfully the performance drop isn’t too bad anyway so we wouldn’t consider it a major reason not to buy the company’s latest processors.
For more on what’s inside AMD’s latest CPUs, check out our AMD Zen 5 guide that explains everything we know so far.
