AMD's Ryzen 9950X3D/9800X3D on Windows 10 beats Windows 11 on Microsoft recommended settings

AMD earlier this week released the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, its flagship X3D SKU, touting it as the best all-rounder CPU for gaming and productivity. We tested the chip and found ourselves agreeing thus rating it a 9 out of 10 for its solid overall performance.

Alongside the launch, the company also discussed new features in its latest chipset driver package including one which makes it unnecessary to reinstall Windows after changing CPUs. Besides that, the driver also fixes a VBS issue on Windows 10.

Speaking of which, the VBS setting was one of the main highlighted points in our reviewer's guide. AMD asked us to test with the VBS setting enabled as this was in accordance with Microsoft's own guidance. It said:

To align with Microsoft’s guidance, AMD recommends enabling VBS (it is enabled by default). The benchmarks published in this guide are captured with VBS enabled, so please enable VBS if you wish to use this data to sanity check. While not recommended, if you choose to disable VBS, it is best to shut it off in the BIOS and not in software.

To be clear, the testing OS AMD asked for was Windows 11 version 23H2 or 24H2 and VBS is not enabled by default nor recommended to be kept enabled on Windows 10. However, the feature is a known performance hog and in a new test, it was seen that both the Ryzen 9 9950X3D as well as the previously released Ryzen 7 9800X3D are worse off in Windows 11.

For those unfamiliar, VBS or Virutalization-based Security, also called Core Isolation, is a Windows security feature and uses Windows hypervisor and hardware-based virtualization to create an isolated environment to protect from potentially malicious code that can harm the kernel. Security is also the reason why Microsoft recommends users update to Windows 11 from 10 via a clean install.

The testing was conducted by the YouTube channel Tech YES City and it found that Microsoft's recommended setting was not the most optimal for gaming at all. In Fortnite for example, there is an 18% performance advantage on Windows 10 vs Windows 11 (VBS).

What's perhaps even more interesting is that Windows 10 still has the edge even when VBS was disabled on Windows 11. Although the gap had reduced, it was still a substantial ~9.25% in favor of Windows 10.

A similar trend was observed in Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 as well, among other games, although not to the same degree as in Fortnite.

Neowin too had tested Windows 10 vs 11 performance back in 2023 both for in-place upgrade and clean installation, and found back-and-forth advantages between the two. We plan to revisit the topic soon and do some Ryzen CPU testing this time. Last time, we had used Intel's i9-14900K.

Source and images: Tech YES City (YouTube)

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