Windows 11 Is Causing Issues for AMD Ryzen 9 CPUs, Nvidia GPUs

Gamer adoption of Windows 11 has been an ongoing topic of interest lately. Many are still happy with Windows 10, but Windows 11 has also begun to gain popularity. People are slowly starting to come around to Microsoft’s newest OS. However, all is not rosy for those who have high-end components. New reports have surfaced that Windows 11 is causing issues with AMD’s newest CPUs with dual chiplets. There’s also a bug in the latest 22H2 update that’s affecting Nvidia GPU owners as well. No, not that bug—this is new. The Nvidia bug is simply a visual anomaly, but the AMD flaw can affect performance.

Let’s start with the good news: If you have an Nvidia GPU, and Windows 11 22H2, open Task Manager. Once there, check out your GPU usage with the system idle. You might be shocked to find it sitting at close to 100 percent for no discernible reason. This is a bug, according to Neowin. Even worse, this is a different bug from the previous one that was causing BSODs and sluggish performance.

That one has been patched, and thankfully this new one doesn’t seem to affect performance at all. But it’s reportedly affecting a wider range of Nvidia GPUs. It flips the reading for “3D” activity on its head, inverting it. So when the card is doing nothing, it shows almost 100 percent utilization. A screenshot of it was posted to Reddit by /u/washed_king_jos. Note the card is running at 39C, so this seems like a clear bug in the utilization reading.

The next bug is more serious but will affect fewer people. The Windows thread scheduler included in Windows “intelligently” assigns tasks to the CPU cores. It’s apparently having trouble with the dual chiplets in the new high-end Ryzen CPUs, including the Ryzen 9 7900X and 7950X. This was confirmed by a Twitter user named CapFrameX via TechRadar. They were able to boost gaming performance by turning off the second CCD (core compute die), and/or disabling multi-threading. Doing so improved gaming performance by 30 percent in some scenarios. For example, in Metro: Exodus the 7950X hit 151fps in stock trim, and 176fps with only one CCD.

This bug reportedly does not affect the Ryzen 5 7600X and Ryzen 7 7700X. That’s because those CPUs only have one CCD, adding evidence to the theory that Windows’ thread director is confused by dual chiplets. This is obviously a big problem for folks who just dropped a wad of cash on a new, high-end CPU. They will have to disable half their CPU cores just to experience the full power of their swanky Zen 4 chips.

It has not been an easy upgrade path for AMD CPU owners with Windows 11, to say the least. Last year when the OS launched it delivered a sizable L3 cache latency penalty for Ryzen CPU owners. That bug was eventually patched by both companies in an OS and chipset update. Also, “incorrect thread scheduling” was a suspected issue with Ryzen users back in the Windows 10 days as well. That was due to games running faster on Windows 7 compared with 10. In the end, AMD announced it was not a problem. Still, there’s some history here. Hopefully, AMD and Microsoft will get this new issue patched ASAP before buyers look down the stack—or across the fence at Raptor Lake.

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