Microsoft’s new Windows 11 video proves nothing about speed

There is a new video from Microsoft on Windows 11 circulating, but it does not contain the proof of performance that has been claimed for it in various press articles. The video in question is a discussion of various aspects of the new operating system, but the actual performance demo doesn’t prove anything.

It’s a bit odd, honestly, because we really do expect Windows 11 to perform better than Windows 10 in certain scenarios. When Apple launched the M1, reviewers noted that laptops with M1 felt much more responsive than their x86 counterparts. Although the M1 is a great mobile processor, light operating system tasks are generally not considered difficult enough to create significant differences in desktop performance.

As it turned out, the M1 offers excellent performance by explicitly shifting background tasks to lower power cores while foreground tasks are performed almost exclusively on “big” cores. This improves the responsiveness of the system and the overall user experience. It was a nifty trick, and we know Intel and Microsoft are planning to leverage similar ideas in Windows 11.

The next generation of Intel Alder Lake supports features such as Intel Thread Director, an integrated microcontroller that monitors the execution of workloads on the processor and communicates this information to Windows 11. This allows the system planner to operation to make decisions about which threads to run on which. Processor cores with more granularity than ever before. We have seen reference leaks suggesting that hybrid processors like Lakefield, which do not support ITD, still achieve 5-10% performance under Windows 11. Alder Lake can benefit even more from these Planner improvements over Windows 10.

Microsoft’s video explains how these new features are expected to work in the future, and mentions that the operating system is designed to give top-tier applications runtime priority. To demonstrate this, Microsoft Vice President Steve Dispensa shows a system running at 90% CPU usage. Despite this relatively high level, he is able to launch Excel and Word in about a second.

Image: Microsoft

We were curious how a modern Windows 10 system would perform in the same scenario, so we launched the same “HeavyLoad” app you can see in the video above and run it on a test bench. Microsoft didn’t say anything about how it configured the app, but we can see from the video that it consumes 20-40% CPU performance and puts around 30% load on the GPU.

We tested the application with 28 out of 32 CPU threads loaded on a Ryzen 9 5950X and its GPU test mode engaged. Once it started, we opened Excel and Word from a clean boot. It took about 1 second to open both apps, roughly the same time as stated in Microsoft’s test. We confirmed that HeavyLoad subjected our system to 80-90% resource usage before performing the comparison. Changing the default priority from “Below Normal” to “Normal” did not seem to have an impact on Word or Excel launch time.

Using real world apps created a better test. Scaling two separate videos in Topaz Video Enhance AI while simultaneously encoding two different videos using FFmpeg increased the launch time of Excel and Word to around 2s each. But this test case included several applications known to heavily load the CPU and GPU, with total CPU usage set at 100%. Of course, it would be different if Microsoft ran these tests on a low-end Atom processor or similar weak system, but the company has not disclosed any details of the benchmark.

In this case, we don’t think Microsoft is being dishonest. His test just doesn’t seem to demonstrate the real improvement of Windows 11 in a very effective way. UI performance improvements are difficult to showcase unless they are significant, so the best way to demonstrate this type of functionality would be to show an identical Windows 10 and Windows 11 system performing a series operations in a foreground application while it is already under a heavy load of background tasks. If the Windows 11 system allocates resources more efficiently than its Windows 10 counterpart, this should be reflected in faster screen updates and smoother UI transitions.

Sure, watch the video above if you want more general information on Microsoft’s next operating system, but don’t expect to see evidence of a significant performance improvement. There is nothing posted here that Windows 10 does not match. This seems to say more about Microsoft’s method of showcasing its improved performance than anything in particular about the operating system itself.

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