In case you didn’t know, Windows 10 defaults at a Balanced Power Plan that automatically balances performance with energy consumption on capable hardware. This basically means that this mode may, in some cases, have an affect on overall performance while playing games. Microsoft has included a High Performance Mode in Windows 10, however we are pretty sure that a lot of PC users are unaware of it.

So, according to reports, AMD’s Ryzen CPUs performed significantly better in High Performance Mode than in Windows 10’s default Balanced Mode. As such, the red team decided to investigate this and came up with a solution today that improves overall performance in a new Balanced Mode.

As AMD noted, the Windows-default Balanced plan, in the interest of balancing power and performance, sets higher thresholds and longer timers for transitions into faster P-states than the High Performance plan. This can sometimes limit how quickly our processor responds to “go faster” promptings from high-demand applications. Furthermore, the Balanced plan attempts to park all logical processors beyond the first 10% whenever possible, and resuming from a parked state has a latency cost that can affect performance.

Therefore, AMD released a new AMD Ryzen Balanced power plan that reduces the timers and thresholds for P-state transitions to improve clockspeed ramping, and removes core parking for more wakeful cores.

This new power plan comes with noticeable performance improvements in Windows 10, though – and as we can see in the following chart – the High Performance Mode still remains the best option for those gaming.

As AMD claimed, other games that benefit from the new plan include Total War: WARHAMMER, Alien: Isolation, Crysis 3, Gears of War 4, Battlefield 4 and Project Cars.

Bottom line is that there is nothing noteworthy here if you’re using Windows 10’s High Performance Mode. If, however, you’re using Windows 10’s default Balanced Mode, we strongly suggest downloading the new Balanced power plan from AMD.