Why Windows 11 doesn't run faster than Windows 10 on Intel processors

Since the release of the Windows 11 operating system, its developers have claimed that it demonstrates a significant increase in performance compared to Windows 10. However, numerous independent tests conducted by a large number of thematic media showed a completely different picture. Windows 11 not only did not show a huge difference in operating speed, but in some tests it was even inferior to the top ten.

The situation looked quite depressing when it came to 12th generation Intel Core processors and newer. The fact is that they support the hardware scheduler Thread Director - this is a technology that distributes existing tasks between threads to improve performance if the operating system has the necessary optimizations for this. And, of course, such optimizations are present in Windows 11. But for some reason they either did not work or worked incorrectly when comparative tests were run between Windows 11 and Windows 10. This phenomenon was observed even when testing a system with an Intel Core 14 processor -th generation.

Explanations were given by one of the authors of the BetaWiki resource. A user with the nickname Albacore executed a write to the model specific register (wrmsr) instruction in kernel mode for “MSR_IA32_HW_FEEDBACK_THREAD_CONFIG” and found out that the optimizations required for Thread Director to work have been in Windows 10 since build 21301 - it was introduced in February 2021 when Windows 11 was not officially announced yet.

“I looked into which versions of Windows support Intel Thread Director, the key to proper scheduling between efficiency and performance cores on 12th generation and newer processors. Windows 10, build 21301 and later + all versions of Windows 11 support the technology. These changes were never carried over to older builds,” Albacore wrote.

It is precisely because both Windows 10 and Windows 11 have optimizations for the hardware scheduler that the performance of both operating systems in the tests was at the same level.