Windows 11 24H2 Boosts Performance for AMD Ryzen Processors, But Not Intel

The Ryzen 9000 series, which is considered a particularly important desktop processor line for AMD's business strategy over the next few years, has been met with lukewarm reception from reviewers and enthusiasts since its launch. That's largely because the company's Zen 5 architecture, which is the foundation for these new 9000 series SKUs, has failed to deliver on the 16% IPC increase AMD had been so confident about on multiple occasions. It's also the first time AMD's Zen architecture has disappointed, in stark contrast to the improvements that previous versions have brought.

AMD has admitted that there is a performance issue with the Zen 5 architecture, and that it is working on a fix. The company says that using a hidden Windows Administrator account is a workaround. Third-party testing has also confirmed that this is real, with some performance improvements being achieved, not only for Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, but also Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series CPUs.

AMD has also published a detailed blog post on its Community website explaining exactly what the issue is. The tech giant notes that Windows operating systems cannot take advantage of the new and improved branch prediction feature on Zen 5.

If you didn't know, branch prediction in CPUs helps mitigate the performance loss caused by incorrect branch predictions, and is especially useful in processor designs with many threads. AMD says that the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 (note that it's already available on PC Copilot+) will address this issue immediately, and users should see performance improvements after upgrading to Windows 11 24H2 from an older version.

YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed (HwU) recently ran a series of tests on various games to see how much the Windows 11 24H2 update can improve performance on AMD chips. The chips tested included the Ryzen 7 9700X (Zen 5) and 7700X (Zen 4). Both CPUs showed an impressive average performance increase of 11% and 10%, respectively, compared to when running Windows 11 23H2.

It's worth noting here that the games were run at 1080p resolution and so the actual performance gains could be even greater.

Meanwhile, there are no reported improvements for Intel processors, suggesting that upgrading to 24H2 for Intel CPU users may not be worth it, at least in terms of performance.

Samuel Daniel

Update 31 August 2024