It is not unfair to say that a large part of the Windows enthusiast community holds a bit of a grudge against Microsoft regarding the system requirements of Windows 11. Certain features like TPM 2.0 and modern processors were made mandatory for the OS to legitimately work.
But to the delight of users, Microsoft had claimed that Windows 11 was designed to get the best out of hardware even briefly detailing how it was being done. However, complaints persisted that this was not the case and as such, the Windows developer team stated during a Q&A on Reddit that it was focusing on improving performance in 2022 especially pertaining to the UI.
Still, though, many were not so satisfied with the performance. Neowin also tested performance differences between Windows 11 and 10 last year on both in-place upgrade and clean installed PCs, and truth be told we did not notice much of a gap between the two operating systems except on a few occasions.
However, our systems were relatively top-notch and the experience may well vary depending on the sort of device. A user on Reddit claims that Windows 11"s upcoming feature update for 2024, version 24H2, is working smoothly on their decade-old Celeron processor, an N2940, that belongs to the Bay Trail family. It is not officially Windows 11-compatible.
The user Bambamito has apparently been testing the performance of Windows 11 and Windows 10 on their system, which aside from the slow Bay Trail chip, sports just 4 Gigs of system memory, an SSD, and an HDD. They say:
performance experience increased! atleast in my experience. opening explorer is a lot quicker (opens in one click no hesitation: same ssd cuz i never reinstalled), scrolling through chrome is smoother and playing youtube videos loads faster (i always watch on 1080 btw)... overall ui smoothness increased.
on very lowend unsupported devices, windows 11 24h2 definitely gives a performance increased in terms of ui experience and its smoother.
The user has unfortunately not provided any hard data to back this up though we have no reason to believe why they would lie with such a claim.
Some others on the thread agreed with this take. For example, user iamfromreallife says:
Yep, I"ve been trying windows 11 on and off and always found it sluggish and always returned to win 10. Now on 24h2 and this thing is finally feeling fast. Only desktop switch animation needs work. I finally deleted my win10 partition.
Yet another user irosemary says:
I had also tried out the preview for W11 24H2 and found it very fast and snappy. It finally felt like a mature OS.
I"m running on a bleeding edge computer (7800x3d + 4090 Liquid Cooled) and W11 never felt that snappy until 24H2.
Keep in mind though that such user claims have often surfaced from time to time like what happened with 22H2, and it is often not possible to verify such things properly.
However, compared to 22H2 or 23H2, the 2024 feature update does have a big change when it comes to bypassing the OS requirements. Microsoft is making instructions like PopCnt and SSE4.2 mandatory and thus really old PCs won"t be able to bypass them.
On the supported side of things, AMD users, especially, can expect a decent performance bump on Windows 11 24H2, with the latest OS updates and firmware updates installed.