If you haven’t been paying attention; Windows 11 has been recently added as an optional upgrade to Windows 10 users clinically insane enough to upgrade to an open beta… especially if they have an AMD CPU.
Microsoft’s chief product officer Panos Panay once said “If you’re a gamer, Windows 11 was made for you.” Unfortunately, a couple of days after launching, it’s turning out to be something of an unwanted gift. Besides being blamed for Far Cry 6 crashes and deterring an entire cloud gaming service, Windows 11 is now causing performance drops on AMD chips as well. That’s according to AMD themselves, who announced in a support post that updating to Windows 11 could cause a 3-5% performance drop in some applications as well as a 10-15% drop in “games commonly used for esports.”
There are currently two problems; L3 Cache Latency, and Microsoft forgetting how to utilize AMD’s core scheduling technology. There was a similar issue that took place years ago under Windows 7 with AMD’s “Bulldozer” processors, but in this case it’s entirely an issue with Windows 11 not working properly. The L3 Caching issue is kind of interesting; what is so different between 10 and 11 to cause such a performance loss?
Either way I spent most of my time under Linux these days… so. 😛