AMD’s new line of processors, Ryzen, have been criticised over their uneven performance in Windows 10 – but now AMD claims it has come up with a solution.
In a Community Update blog post, AMD has announced that it has created its very own balanced Windows 10 power plan that can boost performance in some games by up to 21%.
While Windows 10 comes with a number of ready-made power plans, such as ‘Balanced’ and ‘High Performance’, these are not designed to make use of AMD’s SenseMI technology in its Ryzen chips, which allows the CPU to make quick adjustments to voltage and frequency to maximise performance.
Instead, the default ‘Balanced’ power plan in Windows 10 tries to balance power consumption and performance by setting high thresholds and long timers when transitioning between frequency and voltage combinations, and that can limit how quickly Ryzen CPUs respond when the operating system asks for more power for high-demand programs. The way Windows 10’s power plans also handled virtual and physical cores of a processors can also interfere with its performance.
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Finding a fix
To combat this, AMD has released its own power profile for Windows 10 that better handles the individual CPU cores of its Ryzen CPUs.
You can download and install the power plan directly, and all you need to do is unzip the downloaded file, then double click on the 'Ryzen_Balanced_Plan.ppkg' file. This will add the AMD Ryzen Balanced power plan to Windows 10, and set it as your default.
To prove what a difference this power plan makes, AMD tested a number of games using both the default Windows 10 Balanced power plan, and AMD’s own custom version.
In Crysis 3, there was a 21.6% performance increase (basically, higher average frames per second), while Gears of War 4 saw a 16.5% increase, Battlefield 4 got a bump of 8.8% and Grand Theft Auto V was boosted by 4.4%.
Those are pretty decent improvements for very little work, and the power plan will also be pushed out in a future package of drivers from AMD as well, to make sure that all Ryzen owners can benefit from it.
When the criticisms over Ryzen's performance first emerged, AMD promised it would look for a fix to release in early April. It's encouraging that it remained true to its word, and it bodes well for AMD's continued support of its Ryzen CPUs.
Via PCWorld
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