Andrew Cunningham
AMD’s explanations for the somewhat disappointing Ryzen 9000 performance reports from reviewers earlier this month include that the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update will bring some CPU scheduling improvements that will improve the performance and architecture of Zen 5’s new CPUs.
But instead of making Ryzen owners wait for the 24H2 update to be released later this fall (or let them install a beta version of a major OS update), AMD and Microsoft have pushed ahead with Windows 11 23H2 timing improvements. Ryzen 5000, 7000 and 9000 CPU users can install Update KB5041587 In Settings, go to Windows Update, select “Advanced options” and then select “Optional updates”.
“We expect the performance improvement to be very similar with installing KB5041587 between 24H2 and 23H2,” an AMD representative told Ars.com.
In current builds of Windows 11 23H2, CPU scheduling optimizations are only available through the built-in Windows administrator account. With the update, these improvements are also available for normal user accounts.
Older AMD CPUs also benefit
AMD’s news mainly focuses on how the 24H2 update (and 23H2 with the KB5041587 update installed) improves the Ryzen 9000’s performance; In some of the benchmarks provided, the company says that speeds can improve between zero and 13 percent compared to Windows 11 23H2. There are also benefits for users of CPUs using the older Zen 4 (Ryzen 7000/8000G) and Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000) architectures, but AMD hasn’t specified how much improvement these two older architectures will bring.
die Hardware Unboxed YouTube-Channel Did some early gaming tests with the current builds of the 24H2 update, and there’s good news for Ryzen 7000 CPU owners and not so good news for AMD. The broadcaster noted that the average frame rate of dozens of games increased by about 10 percent on the Gen 4-based Ryzen 7 7700X. According to AMD, the Ryzen 7 9700X is even better, but only by 11 percent. At default settings, the 9700X is only 2 to 3 percent faster than the nearly two-year-old 7700X in these games, regardless of whether you run 24H2 updates or not.
This preliminary data suggests that Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 5000 owners will get at least some marginal benefit from upgrading to Windows 11 24H2, which is a good thing you can get for free with a software update. But there are caveats. Hardware Unboxed thoroughly tested CPU performance in games at 1080p on the high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 – one of the few situations on a modern gaming PC where the CPU can limit your performance before your GPU. Generally, if you play at higher resolutions like 1440p or 4K, your GPU will again become the bottleneck and the CPU performance improvement won’t be as noticeable.
The update increases the already high frame rate; For example, a game went from an average frame rate of 142 fps on the 7700X to 158 fps and 167 to 181 fps on the 9700X. Even so, it’s a climb that most people would find difficult to see. Other types of workloads can also benefit from this, according to AMD Procion office standards It runs about 6 percent faster on Windows 11 24H2 – but we don’t have conclusive data yet on real workloads.
We don’t expect performance to improve significantly or at all, either for highly multi-threaded workloads where all CPU cores are actively running concurrently, or for exclusively single-threaded workloads that are running continuously on a single core. AMD’s numbers for the single-threaded and multi-threaded versions of the Cinebench benchmark, which simulates such workloads, were exactly the same on Windows 11 23H2 and 24H2 for the Ryzen 9000.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the Ryzen 7 9700X’s new 65W lower TDP significantly lags in our tests compared to the Ryzen 7 7700X’s 105W TDP. Both processors performed similarly in games tested by Hardware Unboxed before and after the 24H2 update. But the 9700X is still the coolest and most efficient chip, and can reach higher speeds if you manually set its TDP to 105W or use features like Precision Boost Overdrive to adjust its performance limits. The performance of both processors is important, but comparing the 9700X to the 7700X at native settings is a worst-case scenario for the Ryzen 9000’s performance improvements from generation to generation.
Windows 11 24H2: Coming soon, but available now
Microsoft has revealed some details about the underpinnings of the 24H2 update, which looks like older Windows 11 builds but includes a new compiler, kernel and scheduler under the hood. Microsoft specifically talked about this in the context of improving Arm CPU performance and the speed of compiled x86 applications as the company prepares to push Microsoft Surface devices and other Copilot+ PCs with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. However, we expect to see some subtle benefits for other CPU architectures.
The 24H2 update is technically still a preview and is available through Microsoft’s Windows Insider Release Preview channel. Users can download it from Windows Update or as an ISO file If you want to create a USB installer to update multiple systems, Microsoft and PC manufacturers have been shipping 24H2 updates to the Surface and other PCs for weeks, and you shouldn’t have too much trouble with it in everyday use. For those who prefer to wait, the update should be available to the public in the fall.
