This Windows bug (kind of) explains why Zen 5 was a letdown | Digital Trends

Although AMD’s new CPUs are some of the best processors, they don’t offer that much of an uplift when compared to their last-gen counterparts. The reason might lie in a recently discovered Windows bug that affects Ryzen gaming performance. This could mean that Zen 5 is more impressive than it seems at a glance.

But there’s a catch. While Zen 5 performance improves if you address the bug, the same thing happens to Zen 4 CPUs, effectively maintaining or closing the gap between the two generations. Here’s how it all works.

The scoop comes from Hardware Unboxed. When testing the new Ryzen 7 9700X, the YouTubers noticed that there were some inconsistencies between their benchmark results and what AMD was expecting to see. It was only a matter of a few percentagr points, but it was there. Finally, AMD inquired whether Hardware Unboxed was using an administrator account in Windows.

At that point, it turned out that there’s a deeper layer of “administrator account” in Windows that many users aren’t aware of. This type of account has more privileges and it needs to be activated separately. According to AMD, as well as the benchmarks Hardware Unboxed ran later, using an administrator account results in better performance in fast-paced workloads, such as gaming. Sustained all-core workloads, such as various productivity tasks, aren’t impacted either way.

So, what’s the difference? It’s not massive, but it’s definitely there in these benchmark results.

In Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, the Ryzen 7 9700X scored 162 frames per second (fps) on average when running on the admin account, which is 10 fps more than it managed to pull on the non-admin test — a 7% improvement, making it 9% faster than the Ryzen 7 7700X. However, retesting the Ryzen 7 7700X with an admin account boosted that CPU all the way up to 161 fps (up from 149 fps), meaning an 8% boost for the Zen 4 part — and nagating the gap between the Zen 5 and the Zen 4 chips.

In The Last of Us Part 1, things are much the same, with a 6% boost for the Ryzen 7 9700X and a 5% boost for the Ryzen 7 7700X. The last-gen CPU was faster before, and it remains faster now with the bug “fixed.” Hogwarts Legacy resulted in a major uplift for the Ryzen 7 9700X, going up from 110 fps to 121 fps and putting it ahead of its last-gen counterpart, whereas before the two chips were even. Zen 4 strikes back in Horizon Forbidden West, though, where the Ryzen 7 7700X now beats the Ryzen 7 9700X by 5%.

To try this out for yourself, you’ll need to open up an administrator account. When logged in to Windows, type Command Prompt in the Start Menu. Next, type in the following command: net.exe user administrator /active:yes and press Enter. This will activate the account, so simply sign out of Windows and switch to the Administrator account in the lower-left corner of your screen.

You don’t really need to do all this, though. AMD claims that this bug should be addressed in a future Windows patch, and you’re only missing out on a few frame rates here and there. Bug or no bug, Zen 5 is quite close to Zen 4, and this discovery doesn’t appear to change that in any major way.