AMD Ryzen 9000 may see performance gains with AGESA 1.2.0.2 BIOS

ASUS has started rolling out the latest firmware for its 600 series of motherboards, which are geared towards the Ryzen 9000 series processors. The update brought the AGESA 1.2.0.2 BIOS, so it’s clear that new tests with the CPUs have started to happen and circulate around the internet. The first results look promising for the performance of the current generation of AMD components.

As VideoCardz points out, one of the issues attributed to the Ryzen 9000’s disappointing performance has to do with its inter-core latency. Until the latest version of AGESA, synthetic tests pointed to something around 180ns, a higher number than previous editions of AMD Ryzen.

After the update to AGESA 1.2.0.2, however, CapFrameX screenshots are circulating with this latency dropping to as low as 75ns. The images below show test results with a Ryzen 9 9950X on an ASUS ROG CrossHair X670E, before and after the update:

In HardwareLuxx tests with the same Ryzen 9000 series processor, the observed latency dropped from 200ns to 95ns. Even benchmark results have already appeared showing a gain in performance, but very subtle – only 1% or so.

Despite the optimism of some Ryzen users, it may be that AGESA 1.2.0.2 is not exactly improving the performance of processors, but rather of diagnostic tools.

More about Ryzen:

Some experts have raised the possibility that the inter-core latency problem on the Ryzen 9000 is not something that actually happens in practice, but rather errors in the reading by the software. What the BIOS update may have fixed, then, is the reading of the latency, not the latency itself.

The availability of the new version of AGESA on more AMD motherboard models for Ryzen 9000 will allow for more testing and, with them, more conclusive results on the subject.