From PC World: AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 series looked promising from its initial benchmarks, but the first reviews and user impressions painted a much more disappointing picture. As it turns out, AMD was testing with a bit of flawed methodology.
Fortunately, an adjustment in Windows brings those dramatic performance boosts to life. The only problem is, the relevant update was limited to the Windows Insider program — until now. The relevant parts of the Windows update are now available on standard Windows 11 builds.
In a special interview with The Full Nerd podcast, an AMD representative said that the company was just as confused as everyone else when the first reviews of the Ryzen 9 9950X and other new CPUs showed such a tepid performance increase over Ryzen 7000 chips.
Eventually, it came to light that AMD was using Super Admin mode in Windows during their tests, which unlocked the full potential of some of the new CPUs’ functions, particularly wider branch prediction.
That’s a bit of a conundrum because regular users shouldn’t be running administrator accounts for day-to-day activities on Windows — it opens you up to all kinds of security risks.
A preview build of Windows 11 24H2 subsequently made it possible to unlock those performance gains without needing to run an administrator account, and initial tests with that preview build finally showed the performance gains we were expecting.
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