The bug is most likely linked to the Ryzen CPUs and not the Windows 11 operating system. Several outlets have confirmed that the performance of Ryzen 9000 CPUs is affected but it isn’t clear why this happens.
AMD suggests re-installing the AMD Chipset Driver as fresh CPU installation affects performance
In a weird instance, Ryzen 9000 CPUs are being affected by the Windows 11 operating system. The issue was discovered by several outlets recently, suggesting that if the machine does not run on a fresh Windows copy, the higher-end Ryzen 9000 chips can have an adverse effect on the performance. ComputerBase reports that they had to reinstall Windows whenever they had to switch between any of the Ryzen 9000 processors.
If they didn’t, the newly installed processor would perform up to 4% slower than when it was benchmarked on a fresh copy of Windows. The performance difference could be higher or lower depending on the title and there were some games like CyberPunk 2077 that ended up crashing, for the ComputerBase editorial team at least. However, in some games, the difference was negligible.
A similar incident was reported by Hardware Unboxed, but in this case, the Ryzen 7000 CPUs were also affected by this issue. The problem did not always occur for Zen 4 chips but for Zen 5 CPUs, this was pretty common. Steve tested Ryzen 9700X and Ryzen 7700X to see how much the performance difference would be if Windows 11 is run via the hidden Administrator account vs the usual local account with Admin privileges. The results were pretty similar to what has been reported by ComputerBase.
The 13 games’ average benchmark results show that the Ryzen 9700X was able to deliver 4% higher performance compared to running the games on a local account. The performance difference in some cases was nearly 10% but in some cases was lower than 4%. The Ryzen 7700X also seems to be affected by this issue in a handful of games but didn’t see consistent changes as the 9700X.
In both cases, it might appear that Windows OS is the culprit, and according to AMD’s official statement,
Unfortunately, sometimes Windows does not apply the correct provisioning after the CPU installed has changed.
Therefore, it suggests re-installing AMD Chipset Driver as a workaround but also says that a fresh install is ideal. This is pretty weird since HW’s testing didn’t incorporate installing a fresh copy of Windows. Instead, he chose the hidden Admin account, which resulted in a similar performance difference. Also, the change in performance of the Ryzen 7700X suggests that it’s not exclusive to just the Ryzen 9000 CPUs but may affect the previous generation as well. Nonetheless, it’s a weird bug that seems to be related more to the Ryzen processors than the Windows itself.
