Ryzen Balanced plan behind Performance Gains on Windows 10 v1709

With Windows 10 version 1709 Fall Creators Update, AMD’s new Ryzen Balanced plan is now available to every user by default. The customized power profile disables core parking for more wakeful cores to improve overall performance.

Over the past few days, a number of Ryzen CPU owners have reported higher performance in games after updating to the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Just recently, we posted benchmarks showing 5-10% bump for Ryzen 5 1600 in GTA 5. However, users could have received the performance gains months ago had they installed a previous chipset driver.

In case you need a refresher, Windows 10 defaults at a Balanced power plan however; Ryzen CPUs at launch performed significantly better in High performance mode. AMD investigated this and found that the default Balanced plan basically attempts to park all logical processors beyond the first 10% whenever possible, causing a drop in performance.

Therefore, the company released a new chipset driver 17.10 in late April that adds support for a Ryzen Balanced power plan and activates it by default. The new plan disables core parking as well as reduces the threshold for moving in and out of idle states. This results in delivering a noticeable uplift in a variety of titles running in Windows 10.

In testing, AMD found the largest performance increase came in Crysis 3 followed by Gears of war 4, which saw a 21.6% and 16.5% bump respectively, compared to running Windows-default Balanced plan. Other games that benefit from the new plan include Total War: WARHAMMER, Alien: Isolation, Battlefield 4 and Project Cars.

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update also brings with it a new and improved version of their Game Mode. According to Microsoft, the feature will allow players’ games to use the full processing power of their device as if it was an Xbox game console. So you can expect performance to further increase over gains achieved via Ryzen Balanced plan.