AMD issues performance advisories for Ryzen 7000 processors

AMD has issued a new advisory regarding the performance characteristics of its new Ryzen 7000 processors, saying that despite reports of unexpected performance deltas in some games – as we experienced firsthand in our testing with the Ryzen 7000 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 processors – the company has not seen anything unexpected and will work with game developers to optimize for its new architecture.

Also, despite unsubstantiated reports of Windows 11 performance issues, the company hasn’t seen any unexpected results when comparing Windows 10 to Windows 11.

The recommendations reflect what the company told us after we shared our own results, which revealed several new performance inversions with the Ryzen 7000 processors. These inversions saw the single-CCD (chiplet) Ryzen models outperform the dual-CCD models, which have more cores, happened in three of the eight game titles we tested with the new RTX 4090 GPUs: Warhammer 3, Cyberpunk 2077and F1 2022. We have also heard of similar trends with The Rift breaker and Metro Exit.

In the slides above, we can see that the dual-CCD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 9 7900X sometimes underperform the single-CCD Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X, which was not the case in our initial round of tests with F1 2022 RTX 3090 (the other two titles are new to our CPU test suite).

We previously tested with Windows 11 and an RTX 3090, but we updated to an Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC and GPU driver, along with the latest Ryzen 7000 BIOS and chipset drivers, for our new round of tests, which revealed the issue. This means that Windows 11 is not the source of the status.

We’ve reached out to both AMD and Nvidia about the matter, and AMD told us that it might be unoptimized game code that’s now been exposed by the big jump in GPU horsepower with the RTX 4090. Nvidia has yet to respond to our query. As reiterated in AMD’s full statement below, these variations, as we’ve seen in our own testing above, aren’t entirely unexpected with the new architectures. However, AMD is continuing with further testing and will work with game developers to patch any titles that may be adversely affected.

There could be several factors. Some games simply prefer fewer cores and threads, and AMD’s secondary CCD on any given dual-chiplet CPU also tends to run at slightly lower clock speeds. There are also increased latencies associated with the dual chiplet design due to the Infinity Fabric bonding. All of these factors have contributed to smaller deltas in some situations with previous Ryzen CPUs, but these effects can usually be mitigated with game code optimizations.

Also, the test results published by CapFrameXa popular Twitter benchmarker, sparked a flurry of misleading media reports that often attributed the status to Windows 11 — even though it doesn’t appear the user actually posted Windows 10 vs. Windows 11 benchmarks. AMD’s latest advisory pours cold water on those claims , noting that its own testing didn’t turn up any unexpected issues with Windows 11.

Yes, there were initial performance issues with AMD processors and Windows 11, but as our own testing showed, those issues were resolved last year. According to AMD, there are no new issues with Windows 11 and Ryzen 7000 processors. Here’s AMD’s full statement:

Performance characteristics of AMD Ryzen 7000 series processors

We have been made aware of reports of unexpected performance deviations in certain games with AMD Ryzen desktop processors, as well as performance differences between Windows 11 and Windows 10 in certain game titles. We’re currently investigating, but based on testing so far, we haven’t noticed a significant difference in gaming performance between OS versions in different operating scenarios and game titles.

Many factors affect gaming performance, including game engine, CPU architecture, GPU selection, and memory selection. As new architectures enter the market, we often see performance anomalies that need to be addressed by the component vendor or game publisher. This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it unexpected.

As we have done since the introduction of Ryzen, when these performance anomalies are brought to light, we will use them to guide our partnership engagements with game developers and ecosystem hardware partners to implement optimizations that eliminate variation.