back to article Reason 3,995 to hold off on that Windows 11 upgrade: Iffy performance on AMD silicon

Chipmaker AMD has reported that some of its silicon lucky enough to have made the cut for Windows 11 is having difficulty with the new OS. While not yet listed on Microsoft's known issues dashboard for Windows 11, AMD has come out and said that there's a performance penalty when running "certain applications." The first issue …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Good to see

    Microsoft has done lots of testing of Windows 11 on various architectures prior to releasing it. Oh wait...

    1. Alistair
      Windows

      Re: Good to see

      Testing?

      Testing takes too long to be agile my friend. Let the end users do it.

      1. AMBxx Silver badge
        Unhappy

        Re: Good to see

        Agile used to be a respectable project management methodology.

        Then it became a religion.

        Now it just means 'knock it together quick and send it out the door'

        1. W.S.Gosset

          Re: Good to see

          > Then it became a religion

          I would say, rather: a church.

        2. EricB123 Bronze badge

          Who is This Guy?

          Which lone individual keeps downvoting everyone who criticizes Microsoft?

          (insert MS stockholder here).

          1. Captain Scarlet Silver badge

            Re: Who is This Guy?

            Either that or its their comment nemesis who hates them and has to downvote you everytime.

            Btw anyone seen my comment nemesis, slacking recently!

            1. IHateWearingATie
              Devil

              Re: Who is This Guy?

              @Captain Scarlet

              Don't worry, I've taken up the mantle temporarily. Down vote registered!

              *runs away cackling*

              1. Captain Scarlet Silver badge
                Trollface

                Re: Who is This Guy?

                hmm considering its a joke bit surprised by the downvotes so have an upvote

          2. Pseudonymous Clown Art

            Re: Who is This Guy?

            The Anti-Eadon.

        3. Proton_badger

          Re: Good to see

          And then there’s the companies I’ve worked in where incredibly creative engineering managers were going to revolutionize things by introducing their never thought of before version of Agile,- with a few er “practical modifications”, in reality making it the bastard child of waterfall and agile.

          1. W.S.Gosset

            Re: Good to see

            Amusingly, Waterfall "comes from" a single paper/article.

            If you read it, it's actually Agile. He recommends against waterfall.

          2. Tom 7

            Re: Good to see

            I was lucky enough to get largely out of the business before agile etc became widely adopted. I quite like the idea of some of these 'new' methodologies but still wake screaming at the though of an MBA getting on board with them.

      2. NoneSuch Silver badge
        Mushroom

        Re: Good to see

        Microsoft said Windows 10 would be my last Windows version.

        I'm keeping that promise for them by converting fully to Linux this year.

        1. trapper

          Re: Good to see

          Already did that and mostly don't miss M$ at all. Welcome to common sense!

      3. Steelninja

        Re: Good to see

        Works fine in my eyzen 9 5900x so dunno what they are on about. Snappy as on my pc

    2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Childcatcher

      Re: test

      'Test' is a prohibited four-letter word inside Microsoft. They leave all of that up to us poor sods.

      For the past year or so, any issues that have been reported seem to be responded with 'Will Not Fix'.

      My response to that is 'why bother' and go back to using Win7.

      1. Andy The Hat Silver badge

        Re: test

        Win 7 and security updates and I'd be happy ... colour the ui slightly differently and perhaps fiddle with the start button a bit and release it as Windows 2021 or something,

        1. arachnoid2
          Pirate

          Windows 7 security updates

          There's a registry file for that

    3. Snake Silver badge

      Re: Good to see

      In being fair, would tightening up security often not suffer a performance penalty?

      Win11 does turn on, by default, many security features and technologies not required as default on Win10. Certainly it is reasonable to believe that this, alone, will impose a performance hit?

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: Good to see

        I don't think it is reasonable actually, because they've restricted 11 to the subset of processors that can do all this extra security in hardware. Having done that, they ought to be able to redesign bits of the code to exploit the new processors. Apparently they haven't got round to that yet.

        1. Snake Silver badge

          Re: Good to see

          Yet the first answer to the OP post below this one covers the measured 5% performance hit from the activated technologies, just as I mentioned.

        2. Colonel Mad

          Re: Good to see

          Of which, the majority are from AMD...........

      2. bombastic bob Silver badge
        Megaphone

        Re: Good to see

        in the REAL world, security does NOT mean a performance reduction. If there IS one, and it is NOTICEABLE, you need to re-think your architecture.

        Just because Micros~1's "solutions" (like Defender re-scanning your newly built executable and DLL files EVERY! TIME! YOU! BUILD! YOUR! PROGRAM! as one irritating example) most DEFINITELY get in the way of performance, does not mean it MUST be this way.

        It's LAZY to sacrifice performance in the name of "security".

        1. Displacement Activity

          Re: Good to see

          in the REAL world, security does NOT mean a performance reduction. If there IS one, and it is NOTICEABLE, you need to re-think your architecture.

          Wow. Pretty obvious how you got BOMBASTIC in your name.

        2. Blitterbug
          Happy

          Re: Good to see

          Why don't you add your development folder(s) to Defender's exclusion list?

      3. Kobus Botes
        Pint

        Re: Good to see

        @Snake.

        Shame man, don't know what you wrote that upset a whole slew of the downvoters.

        Gave you an upvote just to offset one of them.

        Cheers (hopefully the beer will improve your self-esteem)

        Edited to change set off to offset (I thought it sounded strange, but could not put my finger on it).

      4. Paul Shirley

        Re: Good to see

        This batch of AMD slowdowns have nothing to do with security.

        As far as I can tell they've removed support for AMD hardware features in the scheduler, for no obvious reason. So Win11 is experimental software you should stay far,far away from for the next decade.

    4. jollyboyspecial Silver badge

      Re: Good to see

      Testing on different hardware setups can be difficult for MS and other vendors to achieve. However MS being so dominant have an advantage, they farm out a lot of testing back to the hardware vendors. So the question is is it MS who've skimped on the testing or is it AMD?

      1. Julz

        Re: Good to see

        MS used to had an entire department of many tens of people who did nothing but test on differing platforms. But that was back in the nineties, things are better now.

      2. nintendoeats

        Re: Good to see

        Regression testing on "any supported Ryzen CPU" is not difficult to achieve.

        I would also say that testing many configurations is not difficult for Microsoft. I work for a massively smaller company, and we have strategies for continually stability and regression testing a wide range of HW that are fairly effective. For example, whenever a dev PC is retired it gets sent down to the SQA basement and gets hooked up to the SQA cluster. We also buy newer machines, for example because we need to do tests with a new x86 extension.

        I'm sure Microsoft can do a lot better than that.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Good to see

        A corporation with multiple billions in the bank unable to afford testing their OS on a range of kit? I think not! Linux appears to be able to handle most kit its thrown at, and I've never yet heard of Linux performing less well on a PC than Windows does on the same hardware. This despite MS and hardware vendors working to make "sure" everything is Windows compatible, etc. Clearly MS is doing things wrong/badly. I dont think they care about the quality of the product they emit because of userlock-in in some cases plus they know that the less IT-able tend to stick with what they know.

    5. Plest Silver badge

      Re: Good to see

      MS has done sod all testing!!

      Like every software company they simply throw it out into the wilds and get paying users to test it and report back, maybe fix the bugs and release patches over the next 6 years!

      1. Snapper

        Re: Good to see

        Not 'every' company, MS is the utter dregs, and has been for literally decades.

        There are plenty of excellent software companies that try to make sure their product is okay. TBH it's only the dinosaurs like MS who still view the users as addicts willing to put up with ANY shit!

        1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Good to see

          "MS who still view the users as addicts willing to put up with ANY shit!"

          Sadly, they seem to be correct in their view. So far.

    6. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: Good to see

      It's almost as if Wintel is an actual company if not a cartel.

      IANAL, all just my opinion and anyway it's just meant as satire

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Windows 11

    sponsored by Intel?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Windows 11

      They also have slowdowns, according to

      https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/windows-11-security-gaming-application-performance-benchmarks

      Virtualization-Based Security and Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity features cause a slowdown of about 5% in testing apparently. Although they did point out that was about the performance difference between a Core i7 and a Core i9 (with a 35% cost difference).

    2. Joe W Silver badge

      Re: Windows 11

      It is called "wintel" for a reason...

      Though I was always one for the alternative vendors, after the normal Intel 386, I had a 486(DX4-100, made by... I forgot) and then had a ... cyrix (?) 6-86 or however they called the thing, an AMD k-something and at university a Sparc (II I think?).

      Wow.

      Too long ago, too much beer/wine/mead /distilled spirits, one thing driving out another as they say.

      1. Snapper

        Re: Windows 11

        Get a Mac, and chill a bit!

        1. Binraider Silver badge

          Re: Windows 11

          I have, but a intel Mac right now with M1 well underway is a bad investment.

          Quietly waiting on the specs of the full fat ARM Mac to come available.

          For everything else theres Ryzen and Linux

      2. simonlb Silver badge

        Re: Windows 11

        Intel did the 486DX4-100. I had an AMD 486DX40 which was really quick for the time.

        The issue was getting the data bus on the motherboard to run stable at these higher clock speeds and a lot of vendors struggled with this. This is why motherboards with a lower clock speed and using a processor with a higher clock speed became popular.

        I worked in a shop building PC's in the earliy 90's and we had someone come in asking for a 486DX50 machine. We built it, but ended up trying motherboards from 4 different vendors before we found one which worked reliably - not an issue in DOS6.x, but at the time critical for Windows 3.1 which would BSOD randomly. Also essential was a good VGA card from a well known vendor so you could get decent drivers.

        Ahhh, the good old days.

    3. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Windows 11

      yeah an artificial "NEED" to 'UP'grade your hardware and ARTFICIALLY create a "new computer" market. Where have we seen this before ... ?

      C-C-C-Catch the wave! New WINDOWS (vista) !!!

      (obligatory 'New Coke' Max Headroom reference mostly because Micros~1 is repeating their mistakes AGAIN, the same kinds of mistakes Coca Cola made with 'New Coke')

  3. Hubert Cumberdale

    Well, I didn't really need any more reasons to hold off for a bit on upgrading. I was always going to wait at least three months to let the people with more time to waste iron out the kinks, but now I'm thinking a year may be a better idea...

    1. LenG

      Deferring Upgrades

      My Win10 system automatically defers function upgrades by 12 months (I bet that is not possible in Win 11)

      I will start thinking about a Win11 upgrade in 2025 when win 10 support terminates. Or maybe 2030 ...

      1. garrettahughes

        Re: Deferring Upgrades

        Given Microsoft's moving ever closer to the Apple philosophies of computer "ownership", i.e., rent-not-buy and 1984 oversight, my next upgrade will be to Linux.

      2. jason_derp

        Re: Deferring Upgrades

        Ha, given the hardware requirements and integrated-circuit-deficit, you might not have any damn choice but to wait until support terminates!

  4. Neil Barnes Silver badge
    Coat

    Remember when ...

    An OS ran quite adequately on a 2MHz 8-bit 8080?

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Remember when ...

      ..and using Visual Studio and ReSharper it sometimes feels like that's what I'm actually running on instead of an i7-6700 with 32GB of RAM.

    2. Hubert Cumberdale

      Re: Remember when ...

      TWO megahertz? You were lucky! We were pleased if we 'ad two HERTZ to rub together – and we were 'appy!

      1. W.S.Gosset

        Re: Remember when ...

        Remember when "mega-" was mega?

    3. Warm Braw

      Re: Remember when ...

      Not sure the Internet is the right environment for CPU architectures with no protection whatever. Of course the solution to that might just be to ditch the Internet...

  5. Gene Cash Silver badge

    "Not so bad"

    You've obviously not been exposed to how rabid a lot of FPS gamers are, even the "casual" ones. They'll spend bucks on a monitor, keyboard or a mouse that "reacts quicker" and 3%/5% would be absolutely unacceptable.

    Actually I don't see why anyone should have to deal with lower performance at all, gamer or not. Can you imagine the reaction to asking airlines to accept 3%/5% poorer fuel economy in a new jet? Memory access speeds impact spreadsheets as much as it impacts games.

    1. General Purpose

      Re: "Not so bad"

      Spreadsheet speed isn't top of my list for not rolling out W11; I don't think 3%-5% would often be noticed.

      Maybe it's part of a general asymmetry about time gains and losses. Take commuting. If you ask people how much they'd pay to cut 3 minutes off a one-hour commute, you might not get many high bids, but any local politician or official that adds 3 minutes to drivers' journeys had better be ready for a storm. Likewise, a lot of working Windows users wouldn't pay for a small speed increase, but a speed hit's news.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: "Not so bad"

      I think 3%/5% poorer fuel economy is what UK drivers are getting with the switch to E10 petrol.

    3. Plest Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: "Not so bad"

      "Anal Gamers", don't you just love them?

      They'll spend more time on the Steam forum arguing about some minor technical issue in hardware with 3 other people than actually playing the damn game they just paid £65 for!

      These are people who've never played the simple 8 bit micro games back in the day, they'd appreciate what we had to suffer in the bad old days. Me and the missus play games but so long as we get 30fps at 1900x1200, we get to see blood spurts when we stab/shoot the bad guys, we get at minimum £1/hour playtime out of our game purchases and we have fun then we're happy bunnies!

  6. Diodelogic

    This is what spare drives are for

    I'm going to install this to a spare SSD

    So that I can suss what there is to see.

    With nothing to fear from errors and such,

    I'll find out if problems are just too much--

    Or, if it works out as well as MS doth say,

    I can always upgrade on another day.

    --Burma Shave

    1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: This is what spare drives are for

      Spare drive & backup image is usually my plan.

  7. a_yank_lurker

    Why?

    Why am I not surprised BaaD 11 has serious issues because the Rejects of Redmond are idiots.</snark>

  8. jason_derp

    What's the bad news?

    Seeing as how news about anything from M$ comes out as "good news stuff, bad news stuff", and we're still in the good news phase of Win11, what's next? Does this mean that when the bad news hits we find out the OS nukes all your AMD silicon into sand and the EULA you agreed to means you owe M$ themselves money for lost telemetry data? Only hyperbole until it isn't.

    1. Snapper

      Re: What's the bad news?

      I wouldn't describe that as far from the truth!

  9. DS999 Silver badge

    The reduced performance is payment

    For increased security/reliability, due to using virtualization to protect drivers. How much that matters in practice, who knows.

    All I know is that as CPUs have added various features to protect against attacks like protecting stacks, restricting pages where code can be executed, ASLR and on and on the bad guys have found different methods of attack. So while Windows 11 may be technically "more secure" in practice it won't matter because closing off one potential method of attack doesn't matter much to its real world security because so many other attacks remain and more are discovered every day.

  10. This post has been deleted by its author

  11. K Cartlidge

    Running Windows 11 on AMD

    I did an OEM Windows 10 Pro install yesterday evening from a recovery image and during the install it offered me Windows 11 Pro as a free upgrade (I'm not on any preview channels; this is standard retail). It installed automatically with me barely even seeing a Win10 desktop. Caught me by surprise as I was expecting to wait a while for a roll-out.

    Anyway, I'm using a Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 which is a Ryzen 7 Pro 16GB and Vega graphics. I don't do games so can't comment on that, but can say that it is running totally fine in everyday use including Visual Studio and other dev tools. Faster and nicer than Windows 10, I've no regrets. Various editors and tools open snappier than ever, and whilst there are indeed fewer customisations there are no show-stoppers for me.

    As an aside, under the Pro edition it was more obvious than with Windows 10 how to install with only a local account (Home won't allow it I hear) and BitLocker still works fine under that local account.

    YMMV but I just thought I'd balance comments out a little and say (admittedly after only one day's usage) that (for me at least) AMD and Windows 11 are totally fine together.

    1. Joe W Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: Running Windows 11 on AMD

      Wow, a balanced view. What are you doing here? Is this not the "Window$ h4terZ anonymous"-thread?

      I guess I have to admit I'd expect as much for "general" work. The bloat that comes with the different development environments "experience" is likely more of a culprit for my own gripes (on Win 10). Do I like the OS? No, not really. Can I do productive work? Yeah, sure (though I spent very productive months (not consecutive ones...) in a past job using mostly pencil and paper (in landscape format)). Would I prefer working using a linux machine? Depends on the work, sorry (at home it's linux only for me).

      Do I hate it when MS breaks stuff during "upgrades"? Hell, yes! (but this is the admins' problem = not my problem, and I will not interfere with their work, they frown upon it with extreme predjudice).

      Do I hate it when MS breaks my workflow? Or forces another stupid change down my throat? (like when certain browser makers stop supporting certain extensions and certain ways of arranging tabs). Or hides menues, moves options / submenues around, changes keyboard shortcuts? Yes, to all above.

      Will I still be able to be productive? Sure. It will take a while to get used to new stuff (which I bloody hate! like when ElReg changed the site layout...), but most of my time is not spent hitting keys like a madman dancing on hot quicksand. I am also the first (ok, the third I guess) to admit that I can type faster than think about complex stuff, or at least arrive at a reasonable solution.

      I will not blame my tools for my shoddy workmanship. Unless I have to coherently format documents written by others or - worse - collaboratively in Microsoft Word (solution: palm it off to somebody more junior).

    2. W.S.Gosset
      Holmes

      OT

      > K Cartlidge

      Is your first name "Knee"?

    3. Hogbert

      Re: Running Windows 11 on AMD

      I just upgraded mobo, CPU etc, as my gen 2 or 3? i7 and board were not win 11 compliant. It was getting old but still ran super fast, but whatever.

      So my rebuild with a Ryzen 7 went well, reinstalled win 10, and the windows update panel now tells me my gear is ready for windows 11, coming soon. I guess it's being pushed out to OEM builders only for now.

    4. NetBlackOps

      Re: Running Windows 11 on AMD

      This felt similar to the Windows 98 SE upgrade.

  12. Winkypop Silver badge
    Devil

    “hold off from that Windows 11 upgrade”

    Sounds like good advice for everyone…

    1. Plest Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: “hold off from that Windows 11 upgrade”

      Well indeed, it's been out for the public for 3 days!

      Anyone who's worked in IT for more than 5 mins knows you never, ever install a GA release of any software, you just never do it. Always, always wait for the second major patch set then start playing in dev/UAT, check and go to prod once UAT clears testing.

      Alrigh, overkill for a home O/S maybe but at least hold off for a couple of weeks until the serious patches are out.

      1. K Cartlidge

        Re: “hold off from that Windows 11 upgrade”

        That all depends on your approach to your local system. And I've been in IT since the late 1980s.

        I switch between Windows and Linux quite regularly, almost depending on my mood, and sometimes I even switch twice in a week - a one hour coffee break whilst it installs is totally fine.

        The secret, and the reason why I'm trying Windows 11 without any worries whilst knowing I can reinstall Windows 10 (or Mint etc) at any time, is to be in the situation where your machine can be formatted at a minute's notice without losing anything that matters.

        Code is in git (commit often), and data (including music) is synced to PCloud - which works cross-platform. You can literally sneak up and reformat the drive and I don't care.

        To be in such a situation means that provided you have Windows 10 installation media available there is no reason not to try the new shiny pretty much straight away. It's a very freeing and low-stress way to compute.

  13. Agent Tick

    Here all works nicely...

    on my AMD Ryzen 7 2700x / X570 Aorus Elite machine - all butter smooth performance under Win11. Takes some time to get used to the new UI but that's it!

  14. Tromos
    Joke

    "FTW tech response that puts high-performance gaming front and center"

    I think I've finally worked out what FTW stands for. Just one question. What have MS got against the Welsh?

  15. Wolfclaw

    Custom build Ryzen 5 2600, Asus Prime X470-Pro, 32GB, EVAG RTX2070, W10 Enterprise to W11 Enterprise in place upgrade, no issues, although I had 2 random crashes in World of Warships but I put it down to the games developers being crap at coding.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No problems

    Works fine on my ryzen 9 5900x. Haven't noticed any performance loss. Its snappy as. As expected. And got a rx 6800 in post as we speak which should help even more. Currently have a rx 6600xt but wanted a better GPU

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: No problems

      6800 was a fine CPU though 6809 was better as was 68000 :-)

      This should have been the world we live in but instead we got a crappy Intel version that is a millstone some 40 years later …”

  17. martinusher Silver badge

    Cart Before Horse?

    Its not "AMD's processors might have performance problems with Windows 11" but rather "Wnidows 11 has performance issues running on AMD hardware".

  18. Binraider Silver badge

    Wintel, alive and well after all?

    /cynic.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Phew!

    Good job I'm not a gamer.

    Oh wait, I don't run Windows on my personal machines! Just that piece of shirt that 'our valued delivery partner' supplied to us this year.The one with the 128 GB SSD... Oh well, I'll lay in a good supply of popcorn for the next installment of the Microsoft Saturday Serial. Anyone got any old bottles of that blue Microsoft Brainwash soda?

  20. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    L3 Cache?

    L3 Cache? I mean, CPU scheduling is under OS control, so the scheduler thing is understandable. But what in God's name is Win11 doing that can influence L3 cache access time?

  21. William Higinbotham

    Reflection of Big Money and IBM type Sales

    Ever notice the disparity of Intel to AMD computers in major computers companies and brick and mortor stores? Microsoft just follows suit with the same type support:-)

  22. NetBlackOps

    If this is the slow lane, I can't wait to see what the fast lane is. I've been using Win 11 since the dev first release and it is markedly despite AMD and Intel Killer issues.

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