Windows has been dragging down performance in AMD’s latest processors

The new Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series has been facing criticism because performance gains compared to the 7000 series just aren’t as impressive as people wanted — but it turns out that isn’t entirely AMD’s fault. After noticing consistently better results on Linux, testers decided to find out if something was holding Windows back and YouTuber Hardware Unboxed (HWU) reached out to AMD for answers.

AMD agreed that the results HWU and various other reviewers had been publishing were a few percent lower than its internal averages and though the difference wasn’t huge, they wanted to get to the bottom of it. After some back and forth, AMD asked if HWU was testing with an administrator account — not the usual local administrator account, but a somewhat hidden Windows system admin account with higher privileges.

For some unexplained reason, AMD ran all of its internal tests from this admin account and suggested it could be the source of the discrepancies. And, after a new round of tests, the company appeared to be correct. AMD referred to the fact that the admin account and local user account produce different results as a “Windows bug,” but it’s not certain whether this is true or not. However, the fact remains that the results are different — and it’s not just the Ryzen 9000 series that’s affected.

Ryzen 7000 is also affected

HWU also included the Ryzen 7 7700X in their tests, and it also gained frame rate performance in most cases. That means the “bug” isn’t specific to Zen 5 processors but also affects Zen 4. It could even be worth testing some Intel processors too since there’s no guarantee that this is an AMD-specific problem. Here are the results from the 13 games HWU tested:

It’s important to note that this “bug” only affects heavy workloads like gaming, so if you’re using your Ryzen for productivity activities like Photoshop or word processing, you won’t notice any differences between the two accounts. Here’s the average across all 13 games:

The final results show a 4% improvement for the Ryzen 7 9700X and a 3% improvement for the Ryzen 7 7700X. At launch, the 9000 series processors performed just 3% better than its predecessors, but with the system admin account, the difference has increased ever so slightly to 4%. As AMD said, the gains aren’t huge, but there is a consistent difference. What happens from here is uncertain — AMD told HWU that the issue should be addressed in a future Windows 11 update, but whether this will happen or whether the problem truly lies with Windows rather than AMD is still up in the air. If you own one of these processors and want to run some tests yourself, you can activate the Windows admin account by typing the following into the command line:

net user administrator /active:yes 

After that, you can sign out, and you should find the admin account has appeared in the lower left corner of the login screen.

While this workaround works, one can hope that Microsoft and AMD will work together to fix this issue, as most users won’t want to jump through hoops like this. We’ll be sure to keep you up to date with any developments on this front.