Windows alternate AtlasOS claims it's what you want for snappy performance with no telemetry

For the longest time, since the public announcement of Windows 11 in around the middle of 2021, Microsoft has maintained that its newest offering was meant to get the best out of hardware. And it wasn't just empty words it seemed as the company also explained in detail how it planned to do so.

When users found certain elements of the OS were still not quite as snappy or smooth, Microsoft promised that improvements were in the pipeline for 2022. Microsoft has continued to make such performance claims and has also not hesitated to detail all such improvements it has made.

Neowin conducted a set of tests using the latest Intel 14th Gen desktop CPU to see if we could find a palpable performance difference between the two and our results suggested that just was not the case. We also did two different tests, one for in-place upgrade and one where we clean installed.

Microsoft was not outright lying about such claims though as a recent Windows 11 kernel deep dive revealed there indeed had been underlying optimizations made for Intel Performance Hybrid, but such changes were already inside Windows 10 and hence, the performance does not exclusively favor the Windows 11 camp.

As such, lightweight versions of Windows 11, as well as for 10, are popular, and AtlasOS happens to be one such alternative. The developers of the modded Windows took to Twitter yesterday to remind users about itself and tout the benefits. The AtlasOS team claims minimal latency, and micro-stuttering, among other benefits compared to the real Microsoft version of Windows 11, and hence targets gamers, especially competitive gamers. It also claims to disable most telemetry.

The developers have also provided framerates in Valorant to demonstrate the advantage.

The above numbers are based on the latest available version of AtlasOS, 0.3.1, which was released in November last year. As you can see, at least in the case of Valorant, the devs claim solid performance benefits compared to Windows 11.

Here are Atlas' claims in terms of hardware usage:

CPU Usage

We've reduced background CPU usage significantly. Nothing that you don't need will run in the background.

• 2-10% -> 0%

Ram usage

Thanks to Atlas we've freed up 1.1GB of RAM usage from boot, which can then be allocated to other tasks.

• 2.3GB -> 1.2GB~

If you want to try AtlasOS, you can download it from its official site or its GitHub page, though, do bear in mind that this is a third-party app.