Gaming on Windows 10 vs Windows 11? Test shows AMD Radeon cares way less than Nvidia GeForce

AMD or Team Red and Nvidia or Team Green battle it out for GPU supremacy — *via MAHSPOONIS2BIG (Reddit)*

Ever since Windows 11 was publicly released, or even before, there has been a lot of talk about performance benefits or losses when going from Windows 10 to the shiny new Windows 11.

For example, Intel's Alder Lake comes out of the box with specific Windows 11 optimizations and when it comes to gaming, the result has been a mixed bag for CPUs as there may be a significant enough performance hit to be had if the Windows Virtualization-based Security (VBS) feature is kept enabled, even on systems with processors that are officially supported.

On a similar topic, Tom's Hardware decided to take a look at the gaming performance on AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce to note the differences that Windows 11 and Windows 10 may have. From the Red camp, the flagship Radeon RX 6900 XT was used and it was put up against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, a similarly performing graphics card.

In general, it was observed that the Radeon RX 6900 XT, which is based on AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, has a far lesser variance in performance between the two OSs. Jarred Walton from Tom's Hardware writes:

Interestingly, the RX 6900 XT was far more consistent in its performance across the two versions of Windows, where average fps was within 0.3% overall, and the biggest differences were still less than 2%. Even the minimum fps only had up to a 5.5% difference, and in that case, it was Windows 11 coming out ahead.

Tom's Hardware also notes that VBS wasn't enabled when testing the cards so we don't know how the performance behavior could change if that were the case.

Here are the benchmark results in case you are wondering how the cards performed across a wide variety of games at three different resolutions. The averages in the table below are based on the geometric mean.