Windows 11 ‘bug’ affects gaming performance in new Ryzen CPUs and the fix isn’t worth it

Last week, AMD released two of the CPUs, the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X, from its next-gen Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 series. While the reviews said the CPUs were mixed or underwhelming for gaming, the CPUs worked fine for other tasks.

And now, Hardware Unboxed, a popular tech YouTube channel, is claiming that the gaming performance of the Ryzen 7 9700X was slightly off because of a Windows 11 bug and it also affects Zen 4 CPUs according to benchmark tests.

Ryzen 7 9700X delivers better performance without the ‘bug’

In one of the latest videos by Hardware Unboxed, they reviewed the Ryzen 7 9700X. After the review, AMD noted that the numbers seemed slightly lower than what the company had internally found out. Upon further investigation, it was revealed that the difference in performance was due to a bug in Windows 11.

The said “bug” might not actually be a bug, but it is certainly strange behavior. AMD instructed Hardware Unboxed to log out from the local administrator Windows account, log in through a “hidden” administrator account (which is the system administration mode), and then test the Zen 5 chip.

AMD’s Ryzen 7 9700X was then retested with the hidden administrator mode, and sure enough, it was discovered that this produced better results and almost matched the results that AMD had advertised.

For instance, in Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, with the admin account, the 9700X could deliver 10 more FPS and 7% better performance. Further, Steve also tested the Zen 4 chip 7700X for comparison. Both CPUs were tested on multiple games, and it seems like the bug is affecting the Zen 5 chip more than the Zen 4 equivalent from last-gen.

Using administrator mode does come with downsides though

However, people in the comment section quickly pointed out that running your PC in administrator mode made it more vulnerable to malware attacks and said that it wasn’t worth the performance gains. Meanwhile, some other people wondered if the performance would improve if they played games in the administrator mode. In any case, we hope that AMD will do something to fix it before using an administrator account becomes a hacky workaround.

Earlier this week, we also reported on a leak that AMD was planning to increase the default TDP of both cards to 105W from the original 65W with a BIOS update. It is being speculated that upping the power limit may boost performance. However, this BIOS update or AMD’s decision has not been confirmed.

In case you missed it, AMD had scheduled the release of the remaining CPUs from its Ryzen 9000 series today. The Ryzen 9 9900X and the Ryzen 9 9950X processors have officially launched and are available for purchase on Amazon and other retailers.