(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton/PCMag)
US chipmaker AMD says it's working with Microsoft to further boost the performance of AMD's CPUs on Windows systems, according to a post published this week.
AMD's Zen 5 chips—the Ryzen 9000 series—are expected to get slight performance boosts with Microsoft's Windows 24H2 update. This update, which may be released as soon as October, will also improve performance on AMD's Zen 3 and Zen 4 chips, according to the chip maker (Zen 4 chips include its Ryzen 7000 series; Zen 3 consists of over a dozen Ryzen 5000 series chips as well as a slew of other embedded and server CPU models).
"'Zen 5' will see the biggest boost," AMD writes. "We're collaborating with Microsoft to roll out this optional update to all Windows 11 users soon."
How much better could things get, exactly? AMD says the Ryzen 9 9950X can get a 13% performance boost on games like Far Cry 6, while Cyberpunk 2077 may see a 7% boost. With other games, however, players might not notice a performance bump at all. AMD claims that its Ryzen 9000 series can bring performance improvements that can make it about 10% better in "productivity and creative" tasks, 25% better with AI tasks, and around 5% to 8% better for gaming compared to its Ryzen 7000 chip line.
AMD says it's seeing a 9% boost between the Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000 series overall, clocking a 6% average performance boost for gaming.
While those boosts may not be enough for everyone to spring for a $650 upgrade, the Ryzen 9 9950X is a solid CPU choice, according to PCMag's own testing and independent review. The chip sucks up a lot of energy but runs cooler than the older 7950X, and offers enough performance gains overall to make it a PCMag Editors’ Choice pick.