AMD Boosts Ryzen Windows 10 Gaming Performance With New Chipset Drivers

This week, AMD fully incorporated the Ryzen Balanced profile into version 17.10 of its Ryzen chipset drivers. This driver package is specific to Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 processor running the 64-bit version of Windows 10. When the new chipset driver is installed, the Ryzen Balanced power profile is automatically enabled by default.

As AMD previously explained, the default Balanced plan in Windows 10 set higher thresholds and longer timers when entering and exiting Performance States (P-States), which unfortunately reduced performance. The new Ryzen Balanced plan reduces those thresholds and timers, unlocking additional performance. “The plan also prevents your CPU cores from being ‘parked,’ an idle state that can negatively impact the performance of many (but not all) games,” said AMD in a blog post.

As you can see from the chart below, there are some performance gains to be had with the new Ryzen Balanced plan, so there really is no reason to skip out on the free boost for some popular games. We see increases in excess of 8 percent in some games, which will greatly appreciated by frames-per-second warriors.

AMD goes on to thank early Ryzen testers that have provided critical feedback in getting this Ryzen Balanced plan out to users:

As always, we sincerely appreciate the time you took to test the standalone plan and provide feedback on installation and usage. With your help, our final build should gracefully install for any user that previously installed (or attempted to install) the standalone plan.

You can download the AMD Ryzen Chipset Drivers (v17.10) right here.