AMD Announces Ryzen-Optimized Windows Power Plan, Updated Ryzen Master Tool And Total War: Wahammer Performance Patch
AMD's new Ryzen processors offer a plethora of performance and efficiency benefits over the company's previous generation chip architecture, and even compare favorably against its well-prepared competition -- namely Intel. However, Ryzen's launch wasn't exactly flawless, as the platform was in need of some refinement. Today, the situation is a lot better, but there is always room for improvement.
AMD agrees, and since the minute Ryzen launched, it's been hard at work making sure the platform as a whole is running at its best. At launch, it was found that Ryzen didn't perform favorably in 1080p gaming compared to Intel's processors, and while part of that could be attributed to Ryzen's slightly weaker single-threaded performance, the biggest issue likely has to do with Windows itself - or at least its power profile.
After launch, AMD discovered that using the "Balanced" power profile in Windows could lead to throttled performance, all relating to the fact that Ryzen sports a new architecture that Windows can't take perfect advantage of yet. However, power profile adjustments can help level the playing field.
It's not too often we see a release of this nature from any hardware vendor, but today AMD has released a special Windows power profile, simply called "Ryzen Balanced". This builds on the default Balanced profile to disable core parking and maintain residency in the CPU's P0 or P1 power state to give Zen "full control over clocks and volts".
In its own tests, AMD has found that using its own plan, versus the Balanced plan, can increase gaming performance at 1080p anywhere between 3.33% ~ 21.56% (a small sampling is seen above). In the near future, AMD is going to be bundling this profile as part of its chipset driver, so that the performance can be boosted with minimal effort (or even without the user's awareness). Who doesn't love free performance?
Ryzen optimizations have also been added to Total War: WARHAMMER when running at 1080p thanks to the new Bretonnia patch. The patch was actually first made available on March 27th, but in case you missed it, Ryzen performance increases by roughly 10.5 percent using the High Preset and by 7 percent using the Ultra Preset.
In addition, AMD has a new update for the Ryzen Master overclocking/monitoring utility, which gives you real-time access to CPU clocks and fan speeds (among other things). Ryzen Master v1.0.1 brings with it two major additions:
- Ryzen Master now reports junction temperature, rather than tCTL, by automatically removing the tCTL offset on the AMD Ryzen 1800X, 1700X, and 1600X processors. See the “temperature reporting” section of this blog for more context on tCTL.
- The installer no longer enables or requires HPET when Ryzen Master is installed with a system running an AGESA 1.0.0.4-based BIOS. See the “let’s talk BIOS updates” section of this blog for more context on AGESA 1.0.0.4.
The newest update to Ryzen Master will launch on April 11th — the same day as the Windows 10 Creators Update.
