Puget Systems finds Windows 11 can finally keep up with Windows 10

Windows 11 written in the middle against a red and purple background

Last year in September, a month before Windows 11 was going to be generally available, Microsoft explained how its new OS was designed to get the best of the hardware. Later on in November, the Redmond giant promised that in 2022, Windows 11 would be faster than it was then.

And it looks like Microsoft wasn't exaggerating much as the latest test data by system builder Puget Systems finds that Windows 11 is indeed faster now than it was previously, though it does not have a clear advantage over Windows 10 either as the two seem to be trading blows in terms of hardware performance.

Matt Bach, Senior Labs technician at Puget Systems writes:

The last time we compared Windows 11 to Windows 10 for video editing, rendering, and game development, we found that Windows 10 typically gave measurably higher performance than Windows 11. That was right after Windows 11 officially launched, however, and there have been a host of updates, and even entire new generations of CPUs launched, since then.

The good news is that we didn't see nearly as many performance issues with Windows 11 this time around, so many of the problems we saw at launch seem to have been worked out. On the other hand, Windows 11 also wasn't a clear winner over Windows 10 in most cases.

[..] Overall, there are only a few instances where there was a clear performance advantage to using one OS over the other:

Premiere Pro - In every case, Windows 10 was a small, but measurable amount faster than Windows 11.

V-Ray CUDA mode - Windows 11 was consistently about 20% faster than Windows 10.

Unreal Engine - Likely a bug with Windows 10, but the Intel Core i9 12900K showed massive performance gain with Windows 11.

The bug in Unreal Engine 4.26 that Puget notes seems to be affecting Intel Alder Lake-S i9-12900K processor. It is possible that the Performance Hybrid architecture of the chip is not quite optimized for UE 4.26 on Windows10, which is why there is an enormous difference between the Windows 10 and 11 systems: