Ryzen 7 9700X vs 7700X: 45-Game Performance Showdown for AMD CPU Enthusiasts

So, how can you boost your gaming performance by 10% with your Ryzen processor without breaking a sweat? Don’t worry, it’s not about tweaking your memory timings – it’s even easier than that. You won’t risk compromising stability either. Sounds too good to be true, but surprisingly, it actually works.

Here’s what happened: AMD published a community post last week claiming that Zen 5’s gaming performance would get a big boost with the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 build. For the curious, you could actually test it out via Microsoft’s Insider Program.

Fast forward a week, and the results are astounding enough that AMD pushed Microsoft to release the fix earlier than planned. And voilà! The “fix” that was meant to come with the 24H2 rollout was backported to the 23H2 build – and you can install it right now.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, AMD’s automated testing software needs to run in “System Administrator” mode, which triggers branch prediction code optimizations that aren’t present in the version of Windows used to test the Ryzen 9000 series.

This essentially means that by using this optimized AMD-specific branch prediction code, Zen 5’s gaming performance would be improved relative to Zen 4. But we’re a little puzzled by this, because we already compared both Zen 5 and Zen 4 using a Windows system administrator account and found that they scaled equally – with both seeing improvements, but Zen 5 not seeing any extra bumps beyond Zen 4.

We’re going to show you exactly how this shakes out with some benchmarks and games. We compared the Ryzen 7 9700X and 7700X across over 40 games using both Windows 24H2 and 23H2 builds. And, boy, is there a lot to digest. But we’ll dive into all the numbers. Let’s get started…