Why are Ryzen 9000 CPUs "slow" on Windows 11? A blogger might have the answer.
Several tech reviewers and publications have noticed a trend with AMD's Ryzen 9000 processors: they seem to perform noticeably slower on Windows compared to Linux. The YouTuber behind Hardware Unboxed decided to take this issue straight to AMD. Not only did they receive an official response, but they were also able to confirm its validity through testing.
According to AMD, reduced performance of the new Ryzen 9000 CPUs on Windows 11 machines could be attributed to user account control restrictions. To test this theory, the blogger re-tested the Ryzen 7 9700X on Windows 11 while logged in as the administrator account (activated via the command prompt: net user administrator /active:yes
).
The results? This tweak yielded a 4% increase in average frame rates across their game tests. Interestingly, this trick also appeared to "boost" the performance of the Zen 4-based Ryzen 7700X.
Furthermore, the AMD representative pointed to another potential culprit for the lower Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X benchmarks on Windows 11 PCs: Occasionally, the operating system fails to correctly select chipset drivers after a CPU swap. The solution? Manually removing and reinstalling these drivers.