Today, AMD unveiled more details like specifications and performance regarding its latest Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000X3D CPUs including the 12-core 9900X3D. The company had already shared such information for the flagship 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X3D at CES 2025 earlier in the year, though, today's announcement also added some interesting details about its performance expectations vs the 8-core 9800X3D (We reviewed it to see how close to reality the performance claims were).
A new chipset driver was recently rolled out with version 7.02.13.148 and it has a bunch of new features baked in. For example, a new PPKG functionality makes it possible to change processors now without a need for OS reinstallation. There is also a new feature called AMD app compatibility database driver that boosts gaming performance in select titles which were previously hard to optimize for. You can read about them in full in this article.
Besides these, the latest chipset driver also brings an updated 3D V-cache performance optimizer. About it, AMD says:
Optimizes Ryzen 9 X3D processors for both gaming and non-gaming tasks by dynamically changing the "favoured" processor cores
What the 3D V-cache performance optimizer driver essentially does is help Windows schedule gaming tasks to the CCD (core compute die) that has the 3D vertical cache. Unlike the app compatibility database driver though, this is not new and has been around since 5800X3D days.
About the updated 3D V-cache performance optimizer, the changelog notes that it is a "minor update" that fixes a VBS-related issue on Windows 10. AMD does not go into much detail on this and only states that it should now "properly work" on Windows 10 with VBS enabled.
I looked online for some more details regarding this and found that there is an L3 cache reporting issue on Windows 10 that has been around since at least 2023:
Windows® 10 works with Virtualization-based security (VBS) running but the L3 cache reporting may be incorrect.
We have reached out to AMD on this to see if more details about the said issue are available. We will update the post if we get more information.
Unfortunately, for anyone hoping for a performance patch for VBS, that is unlikely to happen. VBS, or virtualization-based security, even on some of the newest Windows versions, exhibits performance drops. Thankfully, Microsoft does not enable it by default on Windows 10.
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