Andrew Cunningham
Among AMD’s explanations for the somewhat underwhelming Ryzen 9000 performance reports from critics earlier this month: the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update will bring some improvements to CPU scheduling, boosting the performance of the new CPUs and their Zen 5-based architecture.
But instead of making Ryzen owners wait until the 24H2 update comes out later this fall (or install a beta version of a major OS update), AMD and Microsoft are supporting scheduling improvements to Windows 11 23H2. Users of Ryzen 5000, 7000 and 9000 CPUs can install Update KB5041587 Go to Windows Update in Settings, select Advanced options, then Optional updates.
“We expect the performance improvement to be very similar between the 24H2 and 23H2 with KB5041587 installed,” an AMD representative told Ars.
In current versions of Windows 11 23H2, CPU scheduling updates are only available using Windows’ built-in administrator account. The update also enables them for regular user accounts.
Older AMD CPUs also benefit
AMD’s messaging mainly focused on how the 24H2 update (and 23H2 with the KB5041587 update installed) improves Ryzen 9000 performance; In some of the benchmarks provided, the company claims that Windows 11 can improve speed by anywhere from zero to 13 percent over 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 did not specify how much the improvement will be on these older architectures.
The Hardware Unboxed YouTube channel 24H2 has done some early playtesting with the current build of the update, and there’s good news for Ryzen 7000 CPU owners and less good news for AMD. On average, across dozens of games, the channel found average frame rates increased by about 10 percent for the Gen 4-based Ryzen 7 7700X. AMD claims the Ryzen 7 9700X is even better, but only by 11 percent. At default settings, whether you enable 24H2 updating or not, the 9700X is only 2 or 3 percent faster than the nearly 2-year-old 7700X in these games.
This early data suggests that Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 5000 owners will see at least a small benefit by upgrading to Windows 11 24H2, which is good to get for free with the software update. But there are caveats. Hardware Unboxed was tested strictly for CPU performance in games running at 1080p on a high-end Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090—one of the few scenarios on any modern gaming PC where your CPU controls your performance before your GPU. If you’re playing at higher resolutions like 1440p or 4K, your GPU will usually be the bottleneck again, and the CPU performance improvements won’t be significant.
The update takes the already-high frame rates and makes them even higher; One game went from an average frame rate of 142 FPS on the 7700X to 158 FPS, and from 167 to 181 FPS on the 9700X, for example. Even side-by-side, it’s an increase that’s hard for most people to see. Other types of workloads may also benefit – AMD said Procyon office scale Windows 11 ran about 6 percent faster under 24H2—but we still don’t have concrete data on real-world workloads.
We don’t expect performance improvements in heavily multi-threaded workloads where all CPU cores are active at the same time, or exclusively single-threaded workloads running continuously on a single-core. AMD’s numbers for the single- and multi-threaded versions of the Cinebench benchmark, which simulates these types of workloads, were exactly the same at 23H2 for Windows 11 and 24H2 for the Ryzen 9000.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the Ryzen 7 9700X was slightly held back in our testing by its new, lower 65 W TDP, compared to the Ryzen 7 7700X’s 105 W TDP. Both CPUs performed similarly in hardware unboxed games tested before and after the 24H2 update. But the 9700X is still a cool and efficient chip, and it can be overclocked if you manually set its TDP to 105 W or use features like Precision Boost Overdrive to adjust its power limits. How the two CPUs perform out of the box is important, but comparing the 9700X to the 7700X on stock systems is a worst-case scenario for the Ryzen 9000’s generation-over-generation performance gains.
Windows 11 24H2: Coming soon but available now
Microsoft has released some details of the basis of the 24H2 update, which looks similar to older Windows 11 releases but includes a new compiler, a new kernel, and a new scheduler under the hood. Microsoft talked about these specifically in the context of improving Arm CPU performance and the speed of translated x86 applications, as it prepares to push Microsoft Surface devices and other Copilot+ PCs with new Qualcomm Snapdragon chips. However, we’ll see some subtle advantages for other CPU architectures as well.
The 24H2 update is still technically a preview, available via Microsoft’s Windows Insider Release Preview channel. Users can download it from Windows Update or as an ISO file If they want to create a USB installer to upgrade multiple computers. But Microsoft and PC OEMs have been sending out the 24h2 update to Surfaces and other PCs for several weeks, and at this point you shouldn’t have too many problems with daily use. For those willing to wait, the update will begin rolling out to the general public this fall.
