AMD’s Ryzen processors are seemingly being slowed down a fair bit during PC gaming sessions by a purported bug in Windows 11, and in some cases, Ryzen 9000 processors are slightly worse off.
This comes courtesy of Hardware Unboxed (via VideoCardz) on YouTube, which noticed in its review of the Ryzen 9700X that the results for gaming were a few percent shy of what AMD expected (going by Team Red’s own internal testing).
After some back and forth between AMD and Hardware Unboxed, and mutual scratching of heads, Team Red asked a key question: was the reviewer using an admin account? By which AMD meant the ‘hidden’ system administrator account which isn’t activated by default in Windows 11, not just the local account of the PC owner.
This hidden admin account has elevated privileges, and this appears to be the reason for the speed boost to Ryzen chips in PC games. AMD used said account in its testing, and Hardware Unboxed (and doubtless many other reviewers) didn’t.
The performance drop-off outside of the hidden mode happens in any ‘bursty’ workload – where demanding activity can suddenly shoot through the roof – and this is very much true of gaming. So, this won’t affect apps and the like where the workload is more prolonged and sustained, rather than spikes of processing activity.
In theory the gaming sluggishness is caused by a bug in Windows 11 – or certainly AMD believes so, though this isn’t proven yet – and Hardware Unboxed confirmed the issue by setting up said hidden admin account, and rerunning tests on the Ryzen 9700X, comparing them to the previous results (obtained in the review) with the local account.
Some games showed a big difference, notably Cyberpunk 2077 which was 7% faster (at 1080p, with an RTX 4090 graphics card, to put the emphasis on the CPU) with the hidden admin account active.
However, this doesn’t just affect Ryzen 9000 processors, but also Ryzen 7000 chips. In fact, the last-gen CPUs get nearly as much benefit from the hidden admin trick compared to the new Zen 5 silicon – though Ryzen 9000 does show notably bigger gains in a few games.
Over a suite of 13 games tested, on average Hardware Unboxed found that the Ryzen 9700X was 3.8% faster, whereas its predecessor the Ryzen 7700X was 2.6% faster running in the hidden admin mode. So overall, the 9700X drops a few more frames on average, outside of the hidden mode, but nothing to any noticeable extent.
Analysis: More questions than answers
To be honest there’s a lot that’s unclear here, as Hardware Unboxed admits in frank fashion. Is this a bug? Well, that’s one explanation, but another could be that the hidden admin account – or more to the point, its elevated privileges – simply has less in the way of overheads for gaming workloads somehow. In other words, it might affect not just all Ryzen processors (going back to Ryzen 5000 and beyond), but also Intel CPUs – the YouTube channel didn’t test Team Blue’s chips.
However, it perhaps seems more likely to be a Ryzen-related problem, seeing as AMD appears to indicate that it’s a Windows 11 bug, and it should be addressed by a future update from Microsoft, we’re told. That is far from a concrete assertion yet, though, and testing Intel chips to see if they run appreciably faster in the hidden admin account will obviously be key to discerning what might be going on with Windows here.
If it is just a Ryzen problem, in some ways, that’s bad news for Intel – because when it’s patched (in theory) suddenly Team Red’s chips are going to get quite a leap for gaming performance compared to Intel’s Core CPUs.
Does this also affect Windows 10? We don’t know that either.
These findings may, however, help to explain why the recent Windows 11 versus Linux comparison with Ryzen 9000 processors was a bit more lopsided than expected in favor of the latter.
Note that while Hardware Unboxed shows you how to run the hidden admin account in its video, absolutely do not use this mode. It’s hidden away and disabled by default for a reason, because it’s for niche use cases and the likes of troubleshooting – so while it does offer extra privileges as noted, it’s also less secure, and leaves the system more exposed and open to malware infection and the like.
We can’t stress this enough – don’t turn this on permanently to gain an extra 5% of frame rate in your favorite PC game, just wait for the fix. Which, if it is down to Microsoft to implement, could be a bit of a wait – but stay patient, and don’t be tempted by going this hidden admin route, as it’s a path fraught with potential dangers.
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