Do Ryzen 9000s disappoint in gaming? AMD is working on a fix

The Ryzen 9000 “Granite Ridge” processors based on the “Zen 5” architecture have been available for a few days. However, their gaming performance doesn’t quite live up to expectations, especially given the numbers presented by AMD. what happened

During their official presentation at Computex 2024, AMD announced significant performance improvements over the Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’. Unfortunately, independent tests by the trade press did not fully confirm these figures, instead suggesting modest gains. The increase is only between 3 to 5% compared to their predecessors. On the other hand, energy efficiency has developed very positively.

Ryzen 9000 Series Performance, AMD Research

AMD took this feedback seriously and conducted an investigation to try to understand what might explain these discrepancies between its internal results and those reported by testers.

One of the main reasons seems to be related to the way the tests were conducted. AMD used Windows 11 23H2 with a local administrator account for its testing, while some testers used regular user accounts with administrator privileges. This configuration difference would affect the performance of the branch prediction blocks on the “Zen 5” processors. AMD also adds that in its benchmarks, 14th Gen Intel Core processors were tested with the same DDR5-6000 memory configuration and with Intel’s default power profiles, which may also affect the performance seen in the tests.

Table published by AMD

As a result, AMD says it has worked with Microsoft to integrate branch prediction optimizations into Windows 11. These fixes should provide more consistent performance regardless of the type of account used. This fix will be integrated into the next “major” version of Windows 11, Windows 11 24H2. An optional update will also be released for Windows 11 PCs on 23H2.

Note that this update may also improve the performance of the Ryzen 5000 and 7000.