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WTF?! AMD pulled the wraps off their latest Ryzen 9000 desktop processors powered by the new Zen 5 architecture this month. But there's an odd catch – the chips seem to deliver better gaming performance if you're logged into a full Windows administrator account.
The quirky discovery was made by our own Steve Walton at Hardware Unboxed while benchmarking the Ryzen 7 9700X. After putting over a dozen games to the test, he found the 9700X was averaging around 3.8% higher frame rates when using a Windows administrator login versus a standard user account.
And it's not just these latest chips – the previous-gen Zen 4 chips (Ryzen 7 7700X in testing) exhibited a 2.8% boost as well...
The performance also fluctuates wildly between games. Steve saw a 7% improvement in the average frame rate in Cyberpunk 2077. That may not sound like a lot, but it translates to 10 FPS, which is no joke.
Curiously, this performance delta only crops up in games. Application benchmarks like Photoshop, Premiere, and Blender all performed identically regardless of the account privileges used. AMD has corroborated Steve's findings and confirmed that maximum performance can be indeed extracted from an admin login (or running games "as administrator" was found to work as well).
This is obviously not an ideal long-term solution given the security implications of routinely using an administrator-level account. Admin users have elevated system privileges that could be exploited by malware or hijacked through tactics like phishing. The best practice is to use a regular user account for everyday computing to minimize risk.
Regardless, Steve tells us there was a lot of back and forth between him and AMD to find the source of the performance discrepancy before a possible cause was worked out. In a nutshell, it seems there's some kind of performance bug in Windows 11 that's hampering Ryzen processor capabilities in gaming workloads when running under a limited user account.
Steve also stresses that it's a general Ryzen bug and not something specifically impacting the latest Zen 5 chips, so this is no reason to skip them. It isn't yet clear if Intel chips are affected – that will probably need some more testing.
The positive news is that AMD says the bug should be resolved in a future Windows update, so the best course of action for now would be to simply…wait. But for hardcore gamers looking to eke out every last ounce of power from their new (or old) Ryzen CPU, creating a secondary admin profile could be a worthwhile stopgap – just don't take our word for it.