Those of you rocking a brand new AMD Ryzen build should head on over to the AMD website and download the v17.10 AMD Ryzen chipset drivers.
According to AMD, this release is primarily intended to make good on the company's promise to include the latest AMD Ryzen Balanced power plan in the chipset driver package. The new 17.10 driver is specifically designed for systems with an AMD Ryzen CPU running Windows 10 x64. This update automatically installs and activates the AMD Ryzen Balanced as a fourth power plan.
The company explained that the new AMD Ryzen Balanced power plan prevents your CPU cores from being "parked" in an idle state that could have a negative impact on gaming performance. The plan also allows your AMD Ryzen processor to more quickly raise clock speeds by reducing the timers and thresholds for P-state transitions.
For a primer on the issue at hand, our very own Paul Alcorn explained it this way:
The key issue revolves around latency--there is up to a 30ms delay between when the operating system orders a power transition and the processor acts upon it. The delay varies based upon power plan parameters. Switching to the high performance power profile hands the power management tasks back to the processor. With sole control of its own power states, a modern processor can transition between the various sleep states in 1ms, which reduces the performance problem. Unfortunately, it isn't as power efficient.
The company expressed its appreciation for the feedback provided by end users on installation and usage. Moving forward, AMD promised continued support and improvements in future driver updates.
