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AMD will issue an update for Ryzen to refine its performance in Windows Balanced mode

By Koh Wanzi - on 15 Mar 2017, 4:29pm

AMD will issue an update for Ryzen to refine its performance in Windows Balanced mode

Image Source: AMD

AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X is largely acknowledged as a solid and affordable workstation chip, but its gaming performance leaves a lot to be desired.

Many theories have been floated as to the cause of this, with particular blame being put on the Windows scheduler, but AMD has since released a community update saying that the latter is not in fact the problem. More importantly, AMD said it intends to provide an update for its Ryzen processors in early April that optimizes the power policy parameters of the Windows Balanced power plan to “favor performance more consistent with the typical usage models of a desktop PC”.

In a similar vein, AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a Reddit AMA that over 300 developers are now working to better optimize performance for Ryzen, and that 1080p performance will improve once developers have spent enough time with the architecture. 

AMD currently recommends that users enable the High Performance power plan within Windows 10 for the best performance on Ryzen.

This is because the latter plan disables CPU core parking (this is when idle cores are placed in low power states), which then allows idle cores to respond instantaneously to varying workloads. Furthermore, the High Performance plan hands over control from the OS to the processor, so you’re also able to take full advantage of Ryzen’s ability to change its voltage and frequency in short 1ms intervals.

In its blog post, AMD also addressed reports that gaming performance was better on Windows 7 than on Windows 10. These reports have provided seeming credence to the theory that the Windows 10 scheduler was to blame for Ryzen’s poorer gaming performance, but AMD says that isn’t the case either.

Instead, the company attributes the discrepancies to “software architecture differences” between the two OSes. It’s worth noting that Windows 10 is more conservative with power as it has a stronger tendency to park cores than Windows 7, so that might be part of the reason for the performance differential.

Finally, to further assuage concerns, AMD also published a second post outlining a number of steps you can take to maximize gaming performance, including recommended memory clocks.

Source: AMD (1), (2)

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