Windows 11 24H2 is expected to give AMD’s Ryzen 9000, 7000, and 5000 processors a significant performance boost when gaming, and some new tests give us a good idea of what kind of framerate increase we can expect – honestly, they’re huge increases.
According to some extensive testing (running 43 popular PC games at 1080p resolution) conducted by Hardware Unboxed – a YouTube channel that has put a lot of effort into evaluating Zen 5 performance – the new Ryzen 9700X is 11% faster on Windows 11 24H2 compared to the current 23H2 version.
As mentioned, this is a huge increase when viewed in isolation. The highlight, however, is that the Ryzen 7700X was also put through its paces – and turned out to be 10% faster in the 24H2 test than in the 23H2 test.
In other words, yes, the 9700X is much faster when 24H2 is applied to the benchmarking mix (and the update, remember, isn’t even fully completed yet), but the 7700X actually gets the same boost.
As Hardware Unboxed makes clear, this is an unprecedented situation, with AMD’s last-generation processors receiving an average 10% performance boost thanks to Windows 11 24H2, and some games at the top end of the scale being 20-30% faster.
Think about it for a moment – such an average increase of 10% is equivalent to a generational change (albeit a modest one) brought about by a simple Windows update.
What is the reason for these improvements (which also apply to some apps to some extent)? As Team Red has already explained, it’s due to “optimized AMD-specific branch prediction code,” and there’s no need to know the details of what that means. Essentially, it’s tinkering around behind the scenes and fine-tuning said code to make obvious big improvements (or, as others have suggested, Microsoft has fixed a big problem somewhere with this code).
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Analysis: Amazing improvements – but also some disappointment for buyers of the current generation
That’s amazing, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. Yes, it is, especially for owners of Ryzen 7000 CPUs, who are getting major – almost generational – benefits out of nowhere, something that has never happened before (at least not as far as we can remember) thanks to a software update. Ryzen 5000 CPUs should benefit, but these are not tested here, so we don’t know to what extent.
The disappointing aspect is for owners of Ryzen 9000 processors, who while still getting a big performance boost – it’s just not better than what Ryzen 7000 offers. A percentage point difference, let’s be honest, is neither here nor there, and the obvious reality is that the Ryzen 9700X is only 2% faster in gaming (with the 24H2 update) than the 7700X, which is disappointing and quite embarrassing even for AMD.
Especially when AMD has promised bigger gains for Zen 5 than for other Zen processors with this 24H2 optimization, in the order of almost 10% in terms of the difference between Ryzen 9000 and 7000 – 2% is still a long way from that.
As for Intel CPUs, Hardware Unboxed tested the Core i5-14600K in a small selection of games and found no difference in performance with the 24H2 update (apart from one outlier, Gears 5), so the conclusion is that this really is a set of AMD-specific performance improvements, as Team Red has previously pointed out.
In short, Windows 11 24H2 will be a great update for PC gamers with Ryzen 9000 and 7000 chips (and possibly 5000 series CPUs) – even if the overall gaming gains of Ryzen 9000 over the previous generation are still very small.
The obvious caveat is that this is just a single set of tests – albeit an extensive set of benchmarks. Even Hardware Unboxed admits it’s nervous that these results could somehow be wrong, given that the 24H2 update delivers such a big performance difference here. Partly because it’s a bit puzzling how AMD has presented these 24H2 boosts – trying to portray Ryzen 9000 as if it had significantly greater benefits from the Windows 11 update, which doesn’t really seem to be true. (Technically, it does – but as we’ve seen, the difference is so small as to be practically negligible).
We really need to wait for other third-party testing to confirm the kind of boosts apparently on offer here before jumping to conclusions – but for now, it seems that 24H2 will be pretty revolutionary for gamers with modern AMD CPUs.
The other obvious question that remains here is Windows 10. Is Windows 10 affected by whatever is currently affecting Ryzen performance in Windows 11 23H2? It may not be the case and all this optimization work is meaningless for Windows 10. But if it isn’t, the question is, will the work be done to fix things in the next major Windows 10 update or are we too close to the end of its lifecycle for Microsoft to care?
