Windows 11 bug kills Ryzen.

Ryzen 9000 processors suffer the most

A bug in Windows 11 is slowing down AMD's Ryzen processors during PC gaming sessions, with Ryzen 9000 processors performing slightly worse in some cases.

Hardware Unboxed found in its review of the Ryzen 9700X that gaming performance was a few percent below AMD's expectations based on internal testing.

After some back and forth between AMD and Hardware Unboxed and some head scratching, AMD asked if the reviewer was using an administrator account.

Specifically, it is about the “hidden” system administrator account, which is not enabled by default in Windows 11, not just the local account of the PC owner.

This hidden administrator account has elevated privileges, which seems to explain the Ryzen chips' speed boost in PC gaming. AMD used this account in its testing, while Hardware Unboxed (and probably many other testers) did not.

The performance degradation outside of this hidden mode occurs with any “bursting” workload – where demanding activities can suddenly increase – which is very common when gaming. This issue does not affect applications with longer and sustained workloads.

AMD believes a bug in Windows is causing the sluggishness when gaming. Hardware Unboxed verified the issue by setting up the hidden administrator account and re-running tests on the Ryzen 9700X and comparing the results to those obtained with the local account.

A noticeable difference was seen in some games, especially Cyberpunk 2077, which was seven percent faster with the hidden administrator account active (at 1080p, with an RTX 4090 graphics card).

However, this issue affects not only Ryzen 9000 processors, but also Ryzen 7000 chips. The last generation CPUs benefit from the hidden admin trick almost as much as the new Zen 5 silicon, although the Ryzen 9000 shows significantly larger gains in some games.

Across a range of 13 games tested, Hardware Unboxed found that the Ryzen 9700X was 3.8 percent faster on average, while its predecessor, the Ryzen 7700X, was 2.6 percent faster in hidden admin mode. So overall, the 9700X loses a few more frames on average outside of hidden mode.