AMD Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” & Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” CPUs Manage To Bag Double-Digit Performance Gains With Windows 11 “24H2” Update

AMD’s Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” & Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” CPUs have gained some big performance upgrades with the recent Windows 11 24H2 update.

AMD Puts Its “Cards On Deck” With The Newest Windows 11 24H2 Update, Bringing In Significant Performance Upgrades For Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” and Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” CPUs

AMD’s launch of Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” Desktop CPUs was met with criticism from the industry. The processors weren’t able to achieve the desired performance, especially in gaming applications, & one major culprit was discovered to be the lackluster support within the Microsoft Windows OS. In a previous update by AMD, the firm mentioned that there was a gap in performance between what reviewers were reporting and the official figures disclosed by the firm themselves, and it looks like the main reason behind this was rather OS optimization for the branch predictor, which AMD has enabled through administrator privileges.

Getting to the main point, the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update is set to bring in improvements to the branch predictions, and this update is said to capitalize on the branch prediction capacity present in Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” CPUs, which was previously not being done.

AMD’s internal testing reported a 9% average performance uplift at 1080p versus the Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” CPUs, and fortunately, media outlets such as Hardware Unboxed have now managed to test out the new Windows 11 patch on Team Red’s CPUs, and interestingly, the results do tell a different story.

The benchmarks performed by Hardware Unboxed show that AMD’s Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” CPUs managed to bag double-digit performance gains across multiple titles, and this is certainly surprising given the fact that such an increase is witnessed in generational upgrades.

However, when you stack up the likes of AMD’s Ryzen 7 9700X and the Ryzen 7 7700X, the difference in performance was negligible after the Windows update, refuting Team Red’s original claims since Zen 4 also sees an upgrade in performance in the latest update. These performance upgrades are not confined to AMD’s Zen 5 architecture.

Now, the big question is why AMD decided to keep such a massive update under wraps. The firm could’ve positioned the launch of its Granite Ridge “Ryzen 9000” lineup to leverage the Windows update; that way, the initial market impression would’ve been a lot better. Interestingly, the benchmarks from Hardware Unboxed also show that the Windows 24H2 update isn’t exclusive to AMD when it comes to performance improvements, so existing Intel SKUs get a slight performance bump with the new patch.

It will be interesting to see how the situation unfolds in the desktop CPU markets as AMD has somewhat boosted the gaming performance for its Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” CPUs but the upgrade is still very much what was mentioned by the reviewers when comparing from a gen-to-gen standpoint, & with Intel’s Arrow Lake-S CPUs releasing in October, we will have to wait and see whether Team Blue manages to keep the competition in place.