Windows 11 vs 10: It's not just Intel's fault as Microsoft's latest OS is less snappy

Update: Further testing was conducted on AMD Ryzen to see how it compares against 10th Gen and 13th Gen Intel running Windows 11 as well as Windows 10.

Microsoft has time and again iterated how it believes Windows 11 is the best OS for gaming, and in general. For example, when DirectStorage became generally available on PCs, the company promised an "amazing experience" on Windows 11.

However, tests, since the early days of the original Windows 11 21H2 release, have shown that certain features on the new OS do hurt the performance, at least when gaming, which is why Microsoft itself has recommended disabling them.

General performance aside, there were bugs too, which the tech giant had to acknowledge and block the 22H2 feature update. This was later fixed with an update in December of 2022, and about a month after that, the company released a somewhat awkward video explaining, again, how Windows 11 (22H2 this time) was great for gaming. Ironically, this video was released just a week or so after a Windows 11 vs 10 evaluation showed that the former was not really better. There was barely anything much to separate the two.

Gaming aside, Microsoft earlier this year, also summarized the general performance improvements and optimizations it delivered. The company claimed improved Shell performance, among various other things.

YouTuber Tech YES City (TYC) recently published a video talking about the performance differences they observed when an Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake i9-13900K CPU was put up against a Core i9-10850K (10th Gen, Comet Lake). Interestingly, in a lot of scenarios, the older CPU pulled up a victory. The general trend showed better snappiness and lower latencies on the older chip. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Intel's collaboration with Microsoft seemed to help as the flagship Intel 13th gen (hybrid) processor was found to often be slightly better under Windows 11, due to special OS scheduler optimizations.

To see if it was all down to the architectural shift on Intel's side, independent of the OS, the Comet Lake i9 CPU was once again pitted against itself on Windows 11; and the results suggested Windows 10 was mostly better, at least in the aspects of performance that deal with latencies.

In CS:GO, for example, the load times were far superior on Windows 10, which is a poor start for the latest OS. And the mouse input latency was also noticeably worse.

The general snappiness and responsiveness of Windows 10 was also better compared to that in 11:

Opening .mp3 and .mp4 file locations using right-click context menu was also tested and Windows 10 seemed to have a slight edge in this case too:

The one aspect that Windows 11 did score points was in idle power draw, where the Windows 10 PC was consuming around 10% more.

However, in the latency department, which leads to a snappier experience, it looks like Windows 10 was the one that almost consistently came out on top.

Source and images: Tech YES City (YouTube)