AMD Issues Performance Advisory for Ryzen 7000 Processors

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All is not as it seems



AMD has issued a new advisory regarding the performance characteristics of its new Ryzen 7000 processors, saying that it had received reports of unexpected performance deltas in some games — as we experienced firsthand in our testing with the Ryzen 7000 processors and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 — and will work with game devs to optimize for its new architecture.

Additionally, despite unsubstantiated reports of performance problems with Windows 11, the company hasn't seen any unexpected results when comparing Windows 10 and Windows 11. Here's AMD's full advisory:

We have been made aware of reports of unexpected performance deltas in certain games with AMD Ryzen desktop processors as well as performance variances between Windows 11 and Windows 10 in certain game titles. We are currently investigating but based on testing to date have not observed a material difference in game performance between OS versions across a variety of operating scenarios and game titles.

Many factors affect gaming performance, including the game engine, CPU architecture, GPU selection and memory choices. As new architectures enter the market, we often observe performance anomalies which must be addressed by the component vendor or the 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 steer our partner engagements with game developers and ecosystem hardware partners to implement optimizations that eliminate the variations.

The advisory mirrors what the company told us after we shared our own results that exposed a few new performance inversions with the Ryzen 7000 processors. These inversions, wherein single-CCD (chiplet) Ryzen models outperformed dual-CCD models that have more cores, occurred in three of the eight game titles we tested with the new RTX 4090 GPUs: Warhammer 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2022. We've also heard of similar trends with The Riftbreaker and Metro Exodus.

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

We had previously tested with Windows 11 and the RTX 3090, but updated to the Asus RTX 4090 ROG Strix OC and GPU driver, along with the latest Ryzen 7000 BIOS and chipset drivers, for our new round of testing that exposed the issue. That means Windows 11 isn't the source of the condition.

We contacted both AMD and Nvidia about the matter, and AMD told us that this could be unoptimized game code that has now been exposed by the large jump in GPU horsepower with the RTX 4090. Nvidia has yet to respond to our query. As AMD's full statement below reiterates, these variances, as we've seen in our own testing above, aren't entirely unexpected with new architectures. However, AMD is following up with further testing and will work with game devs to patch any titles that might be adversely impacted.

Several factors could be at play. 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 designs due to the Infinity Fabric interconnect. All of these factors have contributed to smaller deltas in some situations with previous Ryzen processors, but these effects can typically be mitigated with game code optimizations.

Additionally, test results posted by CapFrameX, a popular benchmarker on Twitter, prompted a wave of misleading reports in the media that often attributed the condition to Windows 11 — even though it doesn't appear that 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 has not uncovered any unexpected issues with Windows 11.

Yes, there were initial performance teething pains with AMD processors and Windows 11, but as our own testing has shown, those issues were addressed last year. According to AMD, there are no new issues with Windows 11 and Ryzen 7000 processors.
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