Microsoft's chief product officer Panos Panay once said "If you're a gamer,
Windows 11 was made for you." Unfortunately, a couple of days after launching, it's turning out to be something of an unwanted gift. Besides being blamed for
Far Cry 6 crashes and
deterring an entire cloud gaming service, Windows 11 is now causing performance drops on AMD chips as well. That's according to AMD themselves, who announced in a
support post that updating to Windows 11 could cause a 3-5% performance drop in some applications as well as a 10-15% drop in "games commonly used for esports."
This is apparently affecting, or has the potential to affect, all AMD chips that officially support Windows – that's
dozens and dozens of processors, including the
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X that sits atop our
best CPU for gaming list. Both AMD and Microsoft are "actively investigating" fixes, with a view to launching separate software and Windows updates within this month (October 2021).
