Andrew Cunningham
AMD's explanations for the rather disappointing Ryzen 9000 performance reports from testers earlier this month include that the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update would bring some improvements to the CPU scheduler that would boost the performance of the new CPUs and their Zen 5-based architecture.
But rather than making Ryzen owners wait for the 24H2 update coming later this fall (or making them install a beta of a major operating system update), AMD and Microsoft have backported the scheduler improvements to Windows 11 23H2. Ryzen 5000, 7000, and 9000 CPU users can install the KB5041587 update by going to Windows Update in Settings, selecting Advanced options, and then Optional updates.
“We expect the performance increase to be very similar between 24H2 and 23H2 with KB5041587 installed,” an AMD representative told Ars.
In current versions of Windows 11 23H2, the CPU scheduler optimizations are only available through the Windows built-in administrator account. The update also enables them for regular user accounts.
Older AMD CPUs also benefit
AMD's news focused primarily on how the 24H2 update (and 23H2 with the KB5041587 update installed) improves Ryzen 9000 performance; based on some benchmarks provided, the company says speeds can improve by between zero and 13 percent compared to Windows 11 23H2. There are also benefits for users of CPUs using the older Zen 4 (Ryzen 7000/8000G) and Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000) architectures, but AMD didn't specify how much each of those older architectures would improve.
YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed has been running some early gaming tests with the latest builds of the 24H2 update, and there's good news for Ryzen 7000 CPU owners and not so good news for AMD. The channel found that average frame rates increased by about 10 percent on average across dozens of games for a Zen 4-based Ryzen 7 7700X. Ryzen 7 9700X improved more, AMD said, but only by 11 percent. With default settings, the 9700X is only 2 or 3 percent faster than the nearly 2-year-old 7700X in these games, regardless of whether you're running the 24H2 update or not.
This early data suggests that both Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 5000 owners will see at least a small benefit from upgrading to Windows 11 24H2, which comes free with a software update. But there are limitations. Hardware Unboxed tested CPU performance exclusively in games running at 1080p on a high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090—one of the few scenarios in any modern gaming PC where your CPU might limit your performance before your GPU does. Typically, if you're playing at a higher resolution like 1440p or 4K, your GPU will become the bottleneck again and the CPU performance improvements won't be as noticeable.
The update also boosts already high frame rates even further; for example, one game went from an average frame rate of 142 FPS to 158 FPS on the 7700X and from 167 to 181 FPS on the 9700X. Even in a side-by-side comparison, this is an increase that will be hard for most people to notice. Other types of workloads could benefit as well—AMD said the Procyon Office benchmark ran about 6 percent faster on Windows 11 24H2—but we don't have definitive data on real-world workloads yet.
We wouldn't expect performance to improve much, if at all, in heavily multithreaded workloads where all CPU cores are active simultaneously, or in exclusively single-threaded workloads that run continuously on a single core. AMD's numbers for both single- and multithreaded versions of the Cinebench benchmark, which simulates these types of workloads, were exactly the same in Windows 11 23H2 and 24H2 for Ryzen 9000.
Finally, it's worth noting that the Ryzen 7 9700X was held back quite a bit in our testing by its new, lower 65W TDP compared to the Ryzen 7 7700X's 105W TDP. Both CPUs performed similarly in games tested by Hardware Unboxed, both before and after the 24H2 update. But the 9700X is still the cooler and more efficient chip, and it can reach higher speeds if you either manually set its TDP to 105W or use features like Precision Boost Overdrive to adjust its power limits. The performance of both CPUs out of the box is important, but comparing the 9700X to the 7700X at stock settings is a worst-case scenario for the Ryzen 9000's generation-to-generation performance gains.
Windows 11 24H2: Coming soon, but already available
Microsoft has shared some details on the underpinnings of the 24H2 update, which looks just like older Windows 11 versions but includes a new compiler, kernel, and scheduler under the hood. Microsoft talked about this in particular in the context of improving Arm CPU performance and the speed of translated x86 apps as it prepared to equip Microsoft Surface devices and other Copilot+ PCs with new Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. Still, hopefully we'll see some subtle benefits for other CPU architectures as well.
The 24H2 update is technically still a preview, available through Microsoft's Windows Insider Release Preview channel. Users can download it either from Windows Update or as an ISO file if they want to create a USB installer to update multiple systems. However, Microsoft and PC OEMs have been shipping the 24H2 update to Surfaces and other PCs for weeks now, and you shouldn't have much trouble with it in day-to-day use at this time. For those who prefer to wait, the update should be available to the general public in the fall.