Looking at the performance of AMD's latest CPUs, it appears that the best choice for gamers is the Ryzen 5 CPU. This is because the double CCD (Core Compute Die) configuration on the top of the Ryzen 7000 stack seems to be stuck in Microsoft Windows 11's thread scheduler and is performing worse than it should.

CapFrameX (opens in new tab) and Hardware Unboxed (opens in new tab) revealed on Twitter that AMD's top chips of this generation are lagging behind single CCD chips in some games. In particular, in Metro Exodus, the average 176 fps of the single CCD drops to 151 fps on a stock Ryzen 9 7950X configuration.

Turning off the second CCD would help to get more performance out of the chip, but cutting the core count in half is probably not something you want to do after shelling out $699 for an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X (open in new tab). Alternatively, one could opt for a chip with a single CCD by default, such as the Ryzen 5 7600X or Ryzen 7 7700X.

CapFrameX also tested whether performance would improve after turning off Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT), and sure enough, it did. But here is the important point: the performance of the single CCD version of the chip with SMT turned off was even better, achieving 190 fps, and the minimum was also much improved over the default configuration.

This has once again brought the finger of blame to Microsoft's Thread Scheduler. A similar problem was encountered last year when Windows 21H2 was released, which significantly degraded the performance of AMD chips. An update of the chipset drivers (open in new tab) was necessary to resolve this issue.

Will a similar patch be applied this time around? It is very likely that AMD will want to resolve this issue quickly, as it does not look good for the Zen 4 if gamers actively avoid AMD's top-of-the-line chips. The fact that the Ryzen 7 7700X (open in new tab) is seen as the better option for most gamers does not help much either.