Report: Your Windows 11 PC can silently cripple itself and you won't even know it

The relatively poor performance uplift of AMD's recently released Ryzen 9000 series desktop processors has opened a can of worms. While many of the reviewers have found modest gains at best, others found that the improvement was slightly better. This has led to confusion among the community as to whose results are more accurate.

As it turns out though, it is possible that both sets of test results are actually error-free and it could be Windows 11 that is to be blamed for this wide variance of performance. YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed (HwU), which recently posted its findings about Windows 11 24H2 performance, post the Ryzen branch prediction optimization patch, reported that it shows up to an 11% boost in average framerates vs Windows 11 23H2, a very impressive result.

Although the test results are accurate it is also possible that you may not see such big gains on your own system after upgrading from 23H2 to 24H2. It appears that there is a certain issue in the OS itself that can cripple the performance of your PC even after a fresh clean installation, making it incredibly difficult to pinpoint what could be going wrong.

In its charts HwU has labelled the Windows 11 23H2 installation that provided the better performance as "Good Install" while the one that had inferior figures as "Bad Install." The "Patch" refers to the backported branch prediction optimizations that Microsoft later released for 23H2.

Test Case 1

Test Case 2

Test Case 3

As you may notice from the Test Case 1 image, the performance difference is 9% in favor of 24H2 this time against a "Good Install" Windows 11 23H2 PC, and that is despite just using cherry-picked 23 titles that showed bigger difference. If you recall, the previous test with the "Bad Install" 23H2 showed an 11% improvement and that was across 43 titles, clearly indicating that a bad Windows 11 installation can severely hamstring your system, at least when gaming.

As for what could be causing these issues, there are always a few suspects. VBS / HVCI has shown that it can still impact performance even on the latest versions of Windows 11 like 24H2 and 23H2. Another issue can be scheduling-related problems that are leading to such inconsistencies.

Ultimately what this means is that a user can have 'perfectly set-up' Windows 11 computer and unbeknownst to them, they could still be losing out on a lot of performance for no apparent straightforward reason.

Source and images: HwU (YouTube)