DO YOU RUN WINDOWS 11? It seems that the initial reluctance for gamers to make the jump is slowly eroding. Steam keeps track of who’s running what, and Windows 11 has reached nearly a quarter of all users. Hardly dominating, but at the start of the year, it wasn’t much over ten percent. The reluctance to move hasn’t been helped by bugs and its initial design. Its security features, specifically the virtualization-based security, impacted game performance, although thankfully it can be disabled.
Win11’s latest update 22H2 has introduced a new bug for AMD rigs: if you have a highend Ryzen with multiple chiplets (Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X) then the Windows thread scheduler gets ‘confused’, resulting in lost performance. If you turn off one CCD or multi-threading, you can gain up to 30 percent gaming performance. We await a proper fix. AMD seems to be particularly badly served by Win11—last year, another bug robbed all its processors of up to 15 percent performance until it was patched. Windows 11 will rule eventually, but Microsoft hasn’t made it a tempting proposition for gamers.
–CL