Both AMD Ryzen 7000 and 9000 CPUs are set to receive some serious performance gains when the Windows 11 24H2 update lands later this year, with gains of up to 35% in some games. Some Intel CPUs will also get a boost, but AMD owners will get the biggest benefit from this Windows 11 24H2 update performance boost, with an average performance gain of 10-11%, depending on the exact CPU.
With AMD‘s latest offerings already being among the best gaming CPUs available, these new gains are likely to widen the gap over Intel’s offerings even further. However, with only limited testing being conducted with this update on Intel’s chips, it could be a more even fight than these initial numbers suggest.
These impressive performance figures come from testing performed by Hardware Unboxed who tested the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update, which is currently available via Microsoft’s Insider Preview Windows Update system, against the current publicly available 23H2 release of Windows 11. They tested across 43 games, and while some games saw no performance uplift, five titles saw gains of over 20% or more.
It’s in Gears 5 that we see the biggest jump, with the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X frame rate rising by 35.1%, from an average of 188fps on Windows 11 23H2 to 254fps on Windows 11 24H2. Interestingly, though, this title also sees big gains for the previous-gen AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, which also benefits from a 32.5% increase. There has also been discussion of these Windows update benefits being applicable to Ryzen 5000 CPUs, although there hasn’t been such extensive testing yet.
Other titles seeing big frame rate increases include Fortnite, which jumped by 30.6% on the 9700X, though only 20.4% on the 7700X. Star Wars: Jedi Survivor also leaped by 21.9% on the 9700X while the 7000X also saw a 20.1% gain.
Even more interesting is that it seems Intel will benefit from this Windows update too. Though Hardware Unboxed only tested an Intel CPU on one game, it saw the Intel Core i5 14600K frame rate jump from 191fps to 238fps in Gears 5.
These figures are corroborated by testing performed by KitGuru, who tested the 7800X3D, 9950X, 7950X, and 9700X, with all three CPUs seeing gains of over 30% in Far Cry 6.
It’s worth noting that all these tests are for running at 1080p, with tests at higher resolutions quite quickly becoming limited by GPU speed rather than CPU speed. However, ensuring you have a sufficiently fast CPU to not constantly, or just occasionally, bottleneck your GPU is important.
The reason we’re seeing all these performance gains is that current versions of Windows 11 seemingly aren’t coping that well with the way these processors manage the process threads passed to them. The new Ryzen 9000 CPUs, for instance, include a new branch predictor (a part of the CPU that predicts what instructions might be coming up next), which seems to be particularly affected by how Windows handles the instructions it’s passing to the CPU. The new update tweaks how these factors are being handled, and it seemingly has benefits for a wide range of modern CPUs.
The upshot is that if you own, or are looking to buy, a Ryzen 9000 CPU, you should see around a 10% performance improvement in your games when you update to Windows 11 24H2. Meanwhile, older Ryzen CPU owners should also see big gains, and even Intel CPU owners should keep an eye out for the update dropping later this year (expected to be in November).
For more on what’s inside AMD’s latest Ryzen 9000 CPUs, check out our AMD Zen 5 guide, which details the inner workings and key stats of its latest chips.