AMD’s Ryzen processors appear to be experiencing significant slowdowns during PC gaming sessions due to a reported bug in Windows 11. In some cases, Ryzen 9000 processors are performing even worse.
This is a courtesy of Hardware Unboxed (via Video cardz) on YouTube, which noted in its review of the Ryzen 9700X that gaming results were a few percent lower than AMD expected (according to Team Red’s own internal testing).
After some back and forth between AMD and Hardware Unboxed, and mutual head-scratching, Team Red asked an important question: was the reviewer using an admin account? By that, AMD was referring to the “hidden” system administrator account that’s not enabled by default in Windows 11, not just the PC owner’s local account.
This hidden admin account has elevated privileges, and it appears to be the reason for the speed boost for Ryzen chips in PC games. AMD used that account in its tests, which Hardware Unboxed (and no doubt many other reviewers) did not.
The performance drop outside of stealth mode occurs with any ‘bursty’ workload – where resource-intensive activity can suddenly shoot through the roof – and this is especially true with gaming. So this doesn’t affect apps and the like, where workloads are longer and sustained, rather than just spikes in processing activity.
In theory, the gaming sluggishness is caused by a bug in Windows 11 – or so AMD thinks, but it hasn’t been proven yet – and Hardware Unboxed confirmed the issue by setting up the hidden administrator account and re-running tests on the Ryzen 9700X, comparing them to the previous results (obtained in the review) with the local account.
In some games, there was a big difference, most notably Cyberpunk 2077, which was 7% faster (at 1080p, with an RTX 4090 video card, to emphasize the CPU) with the hidden administrator account active.
This doesn’t just affect Ryzen 9000 processors, though, as it does Ryzen 7000 chips. In fact, previous-gen CPUs benefit from the hidden admin trick nearly as much as the new Zen 5 silicon does, though Ryzen 9000 sees notably bigger gains in some games.
Across a batch of 13 games tested, Hardware Unboxed found that the Ryzen 9700X was 3.8% faster on average, while its predecessor, the Ryzen 7700X, was 2.6% faster in hidden admin mode. So overall, the 9700X drops a few more frames on average outside of hidden mode, but nothing to any significant degree.
Analysis: More questions than answers
To be fair, there’s a lot that’s unclear here, as Hardware Unboxed candidly admits. Is this a bug? Well, that’s one explanation, but another could be that the hidden admin account – or rather, its elevated privileges – somehow simply introduces less overhead for gaming workloads. In other words, it could affect not only all Ryzen processors (going back to the Ryzen 5000 and beyond), but Intel CPUs as well – the YouTube channel hasn’t tested Team Blue’s chips.
However, it seems more likely that this is a Ryzen-related issue, as AMD appears to indicate that this is a Windows 11 bug and that it should be fixed in a future update from Microsoft, we’re told. That’s far from a concrete claim, though, and testing Intel chips to see if they run significantly faster in the hidden admin account will obviously be key to figuring out what’s going on with Windows here.
If it’s just a Ryzen issue, that’s bad news for Intel in a way. Because if a patch comes (in theory), Team Red’s chips will suddenly see a significant leap forward in gaming performance compared to Intel’s Core CPUs.
Does this also affect Windows 10? We don’t know that either.
However, these findings may help explain why the recent comparison between Windows 11 and Linux running Ryzen 9000 processors turned out to be a bit more skewed than expected, in favor of the latter.
Note that Hardware Unboxed shows you in the video how to run the hidden admin account, but absolutely do not use this mode. It is hidden and disabled by default for a reason, as it is intended for niche use cases and troubleshooting. While it does provide additional privileges as noted, it is also less secure and leaves the system more exposed and open to malware infections and the like.
We can’t stress this enough: don’t permanently enable this to get 5% extra framerate in your favorite PC game, just wait for the fix. If it’s up to Microsoft to implement it, it might take a while, but be patient and don’t be tempted to take this hidden admin route, as it’s a path fraught with potential dangers.