Windows 11 slows down AMD chips in games



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Microsoft Product Manager Panos Panay once said, “If you’re a gamer, Windows 11 is for you. Unfortunately, a few days after launch, this turns out to be an unwanted giveaway. Aside from being blamed for Far Cry 6 crashes and deterring an entire cloud gaming service, Windows 11 is also causing performance drops on AMD chips. This is according to AMD itself, which announced in a support article that updating to Windows 11 could result in a performance drop of 3-5% in some applications as well as a drop of 10-15%. “games commonly used for esports”.

This apparently affects, or could affect, all AMD chips that officially support Windows – i.e. dozens and dozens of processors, including the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X which sits atop our best. list of processors for games. AMD and Microsoft are “actively studying” fixes, with a view to launching separate software and Windows updates later this month (October 2021).

According to AMD’s post, there are two separate issues when pairing Windows 11 with an AMD processor. The first, and most concerning for game performance, is a huge increase in L3 cache latency: in Queen’s English, this means that one of the memory banks of an affected processor is slowing down, making access to data stored in the main system memory longer. “Games commonly used for esports” may be intentionally vague, but probably refers to less graphically demanding but memory and processor sensitive games like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2. A drop from 10 to 15% could be easily noticeable, especially if you’re playing at 60fps or less, although AMD’s post calls such examples “outliers,” so the 3-5% reduction is probably much more common. Even so, got a little bit rubbish.

The second problem is that AMD’s “preferred core” technology does not accurately allocate applications to the fastest cores on an affected processor. There aren’t any scary percentages given here, but since many games still only use one or two cores at a time, it’s not hard to imagine that it could hurt frame rates as well. . “The performance impact may be more detectable in processors> 8 cores above 65W TDP,” the post states, although this does not mean that 6-core chips (like the Ryzen 5 5600X) and inferior are immune.

It’s good that AMD and Microsoft are both so aware of these issues that they have an ETA for fixes, albeit a large one. But damn it, Windows 11 is really struggling to hold the landing. Running its flagship DirectStorage feature without game support is one thing, but actively triggering Ryzens? For something that’s supposed to be made for gaming, Windows 11 provides plenty of reasons to pass it on.



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