Windows 11 is still not really faster than Windows 10 despite what Microsoft suggested

Intel and Windows 11 logos side by side with Windows 11 default wallpaper as background

Back at its Architecture Day 2021 event, when Intel shared the core design details of its Alder Lake CPU architecture, the firm stated that Windows 11 was optimized in a way to best take advantage of the Alder Lake's Performance Hybrid architecture and the new Thread Director technology that helps Windows 11 task scheduling.

Aside from that, Microsoft also claimed on a separate occasion that Windows 11 was designed to get the best out of the hardware available to it, and explained how it did so. Although it wasn't the case initially, Microsoft's claims certainly started to be proved somewhat right as Windows 11 was seen catching up to and keeping up with Windows 10, at least in the case of certain workloads.

Getting back to the Intel hybrid CPU discussion, PCWorld tested a Raptor Lake-S Core i9-13900K on Windows 11 22H2 and compared it against Windows 10 22H2. Raptor Lake succeeds Alder Lake and is built on top of the same Performance Hybrid architecture.

While there certainly were instances where Windows 11 was better, there were also many scenarios where it was not. And Windows 10 also came out ahead on quite a few occasions. Here are the benchmark figures for photo and video editing in PugetBench and UL's Procyon:

Up next, we have the scores in Cinebench (rendering), Nero Score, which tests the CPU, AI photo tagging, and AVC (H.264) codec performance. There is also Handbrake which tests video codec conversion or transcoding:

Following those, we have Chrome 107 tests, Procyon's Office benchmark results, and Bapco's Crossmark Enterprise test.

Finally, we have the gaming results which show almost identical performance across both OS except in the case of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is known to be a single-threaded title:

Overall, it looks like the latest versions of Windows 11 and Windows 10 are still trading blows with one another, just like they had been when Windows 11 was first made available. There are generally single-digit performance differentials one way or the other.

Source: PCWorld (YouTube)