Old Intel 10th Gen is snappier vs newer 13th Gen and also AMD's Ryzen 7000 in Windows 10

Since July, we have been covering a series of performance tests that examine the responsiveness and snappiness of Intel's newer processors on Windows 10 and Windows 11 compared to some of the older parts.

Although it is no surprise that Intel's 13th Gen/12th Gen SKUs are easily able to outdo their 10th Gen counterparts in benchmarks, the idea behind these tests has been to quantify the responsiveness or snappiness of the processors in day-to-day PC activities.

One of the key components of a snappy experience is the I/O and apparently, certain architectural decisions made at Intel with 12th Gen and 13th Gen processors, which are Intel's first hybrid parts, have apparently led to the company moving the "I/O driver" of the uncore (System Agent) to be moved off the CPU. (On a related note, anti-virus apps can also slow down certain aspects of your PC as noted by AV-TEST in its latest report.)

This has led to performance penalties in the case of Windows 10 it seems, though the specific Thread Director optimizations on Windows 11 meant that the latter is typically more responsive of the two OSes on a 12th Gen (Alder Lake) or 13th Gen (Raptor Lake) system.

To confirm if indeed the newer Microsoft OS is not as reactive as Windows 10, another study, this time with the 10th gen Core i9, was run and the results showed Windows 11 was definitely lagging behind, at least by a slight bit, in almost every single test.

While most of these tests were done using Intel 10th Gen and 13th gen CPUs, an AMD Ryzen 7000 series processor, based on Zen 4, was thrown into the mix this time, and curiously enough, AMD's much more modern offering also fell behind the older Intel chip more often than not. The CPU used for testing was the Ryzen 9 7950X, which is a 16 core 32 thread SKU.

The Ryzen managed a victory in one out of the four tests as it was the best chip at opening music files. The Zen 4 recorded took an average of 72.2 milliseconds compared to 112.5ms on the 13900K and 124.9ms on the 10850K. Interestingly, the 10th Gen Intel CPU looks like the most consistent of the bunch as its results were grouped the closest together.

In terms of visible input latency with a mouse as the input, the numbers were the closest between the three indicating none of the CPUs is a bad choice for such a scenario. DPC (Deferred procedure call) latency though is the best on the 10th Gen Intel, but the Ryzen 7950X is still easily able to outdo the 13th Gen processor.

The worst showing from AMD was in file searching using the Taskbar Search. In this case, both the Intel CPUs were nearly five times faster as the 7950X took over 80 ms to complete the task as compared to the Intel chips that were able to do it under 17ms.

Head over to this article to compare and contrast with the Windows 11 data. You can watch the full video on Tech YES City's channel on YouTube at the source link below.

Source and images: Tech YES City (YouTube)