As of October 5th, Microsoft has begun allowing users to install Windows 11’s official release through Windows Update and from Microsoft’s Media Creation Tool. While Windows 11 brings a refreshing UI redesign and many new features, its current release results in a measurable and significant drop in performance for some workloads when paired with Ryzen CPUs.
As listed by AMD’s site, the two issues are L3 cache latency being approximately tripled and the preferred (fastest) core may not be used appropriately. While these are quite significant issues for a new OS, AMD and Microsoft are planning to release a update this month to fix these issues. Somewhat disappointingly, these issues have been present since early Insider builds and have still made it to the final release. Additionally, VBS and HVCI, two security features enabled by default in Windows 11 also reduce performance in games and applications as measured by Tom’s Hardware. This affects both Intel and AMD CPUs and cannot be fixed by updates, although users can choose to disable these two features to get any lost performance back.
