Whoa! Ryzen 9000 CPUs get a huge gaming bump in Windows preview build

The launch of the Ryzen 9000 series was highly anticipated but arrived with a bit of a thud, at least amongst PC gamers. Initial reviews weren’t seeing much of an improvement over the previous-gen CPUs, and they fell far short of AMD’s in-house promotional benchmarks. AMD told us that this was due to a difference in testing environments and that we’d see the same performance gains after an upcoming Windows 11 update.

That update, 24H2, is now in the Windows Insider preview build pipeline — you can install it today. Noted YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed did just that, testing the new Ryzen 7 9700X and the equivalent Ryzen 7 7700X from 2022, and comparing the results against the older Windows build.

Long story short: The gaming performance gains are massive using the Windows 24H2 build, for both Ryzen chips. Hardware Unboxed recorded performance improvements that averaged around 10 percent across a testing suite of 40+ games on Ryzen 9000, with several games topping 20 percent and extreme outliers running around 30 percent faster. While some optimized titles didn’t get that huge bump — Counter-Strike 2 gained just 2 percent, for example — the performance improvement seems to be pretty consistent.

Here’s the full video, with 9700X and 7700X benchmarks on Windows 11 23H2 and the latest 24H2 Insider Preview for a whole bunch of games:

AMD’s reasoning for the discrepancy in its initial performance claims and what the first reviews saw is a bit of a self-own. The company says that its testing used a Super Admin mode that had greater access to functions that benefited AMD’s Zen 5 chip architecture with wider branch prediction.

Normal users shouldn’t be operating Windows in this way (not even if they want those frames). But the Windows 11 24H2 update should give compatible hardware like the Ryzen 9000 series system-level access to those performance improvements, while keeping users safe.

Ten percent improvement in gaming delivers results much more in line with what most consumers were expecting, and far more justifiable as an upgrade — though note that the Windows 11 24H2 gaming boost also applies to the last-gen Ryzen 7 7700X in HUB’s testing. Gamers in particular are looking forward to the X3D variants of these chips, which include extra cache specifically to enhance gaming capabilities.

For more info on AMD’s initial testing woes and how the upcoming Windows changes will straighten them out, check out PCWorld’s interview with AMD’s David McAfee from last week.