AMD recently released its Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors, which boasted an impressive 16% IPC (instructions per clock/cycle) increase when they were announced at Computex 2024. This was a great opportunity for AMD, as rival Intel is currently struggling with CPU stability issues.
Unfortunately, AMD couldn’t seem to capitalize on the situation, with most tech media feeling that Ryzen 9000’s performance boost wasn’t enough compared to the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 series CPUs. The only area where the new chips impressed me is power efficiency, and it seems that’s where most of the IPC gains went.
But that’s not all. Recently, comparative performance tests between Windows 11 24H2 and Linux (Nobara) found that the latter came out on top much more often in gaming and other workloads in general, suggesting that Windows needs more optimization.
It seems we were right in our assumption that Windows in its current state does indeed slow down AMD’s Ryzen processors, at least some of them.
YouTube Hardware Unboxed (HWU) recently reached out to AMD regarding Zen 5 performance, and AMD claimed that a Windows bug related to account permissions was the reason for the performance loss on Ryzen 9000 series desktop CPUs.
When retested using the administrator account, the Zen 5 part, Ryzen 7 9700X, increased by almost 4% in average frame rates and just over 3.5% in percentile lows.
For anyone wondering, the Administrator account is generally hidden in Windows, but can be accessed using the following command:
net user administrator /active:yes
It has one of the highest privileges in the Windows environment, surpassed only by the SYSTEM account.
Oddly enough, although AMD said the issue is unique to Zen 5, it seems that the Zen 4-based 7700X also showed improved performance, suggesting that the bug could affect the entire Socket AM5 lineup. It will be interesting to see if the issue also applies to Socket AM4 chips.
Speaking of sockets, AMD has also reportedly hinted that incorrect driver deployment in Windows could also play a role. The company has apparently indicated that when changing CPUs, reviewers clean up Windows or at least reinstall the chipset driver.
Provisioning essentially means automatically configuring the PC so that the driver is appropriately deployed on a system.
Source: HWU (YouTube)
