AMD Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” and Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” CPUs See Double-Digit Performance Gains with Windows 11 “24H2” Update

AMD’s Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” and Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” processors received significant performance upgrades with the recent Windows 11 24H2 update.

AMD Puts Its “Cards on the Deck” with the Latest Windows 11 24H2 Update, Bringing Significant Performance Improvements for Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” and Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” CPUs

AMD’s launch of the Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” desktop processors has been met with criticism from the industry. The processors have failed to deliver the desired performance, especially in gaming applications, and one of the main culprits has proven to be the lack of support within the Microsoft Windows operating system. In a previous update from AMD, the company mentioned that there was a performance gap between what reviewers were reporting and the official numbers leaked by the company itself, and it seems that the main reason behind this is instead the OS’s optimization for branch predictor, which AMD enabled via administrator privileges.

Coming to the main point, the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update is expected to bring improvements to branch predictions, and this update is expected to capitalize on the branch prediction capability present in the Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” processors, which was not done before.

AMD’s internal testing reported an average performance improvement of 9% at 1080p over the Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” processors, and thankfully, outlets like Hardware Unboxed have now managed to test the new Windows 11 patch on Team Red’s processors, and interestingly, the results tell a different story.

Testing by Hardware Unboxed shows that AMD’s “Zen 5” Ryzen 9000 processors managed to achieve double-digit performance gains across multiple titles, which is certainly surprising given that such an increase is seen in generational upgrades.

However, when comparing AMD’s Ryzen 7 9700X and Ryzen 7 7700X processors, the performance difference is negligible after the Windows update, which contradicts Team Red’s initial claims since Zen 4 also gets a performance boost in the latest update. These performance improvements are not limited to AMD’s Zen 5 architecture.

The big question now is why AMD decided to keep such a massive update under wraps. The company could have positioned the launch of its Granite Ridge “Ryzen 9000” lineup to take advantage of the Windows update; that way, the initial market impression would have been much better. Interestingly, Hardware Unboxed’s benchmarks also show that the Windows 24H2 update is not exclusive to AMD when it comes to performance improvements, so existing Intel SKUs are seeing a slight performance boost with the new patch.

It will be interesting to see how things play out in the desktop CPU markets, as AMD has improved the gaming performance of its Ryzen 9000 “Zen 5” processors somewhat, but the upgrade is still in line with what reviewers have mentioned when comparing it from a generation-over-generation perspective, and with Intel’s Arrow Lake-S processors coming in October, we’ll have to wait and see if Team Blue can keep the competition in check.