Windows 10 kind of sucks on Intel 12th gen right now, at least in certain tasks, but Windows 11
isn’t perfect either. Classic Microsoft moves I guess, pick your poison right? I’ve compared
both games and applications to show you why Windows 11 is the way to go with Intel 12th gen!
The performance problems stem from Intel’s new 12th gen introducing
a hybrid architecture with P and E cores. P cores, or performance cores,
are basically your regular cores as we’ve had before, while the new E cores, or efficient cores,
are smaller lower powered cores that can handle less important background tasks.
I’ve done all of my testing with the i7-12700KF that I bought. It’s got
8 P cores with hyperthreading and 4 E cores that do not have hyperthreading,
making it a 12 core 20 thread processor.
This is the system that I’ve used for testing. Basically the only difference was that after
my Windows 11 testing, I reinstalled Windows 10 on the same SSD and made sure I used the
same Nvidia drivers on both. The operating system is literally the only difference,
and core isolation was off on both, which was default for my hardware after installation.
Long story short, the 12th gen CPUs make use of Intel Thread Director which helps
the updated Windows 11 scheduler know whether it should place a process on a P core or E core.
The problem is this isn’t available in Windows 10.
Now Intel have said that they expect Windows 10 to perform worse than Windows 11 on 12th gen,
and this is due to that scheduler difference. Basically they said there would be more run to
run variance, so slightly different results between multiple tests,
which is apparently not something the end user would actually notice, but we’ll see about that.
The problem can pretty much be summarized as Windows 10 doesn’t really seem to know how to
distinguish between a P core and an E core, so it might just stick the process wherever.
Let’s get straight into the benchmarks and find out the differences between Windows 10 and Windows
11 on Intel 12th gen - hey Intel and Microsoft can count. You know, because 10, 11, 12.. You get it.
Anyway we’ll start out with productivity applications followed
by the more interesting gaming results afterwards.
I thought there was something seriously wrong while running Handbrake on the Windows 10 setup,
because the time estimate was 3 to 4 times longer than when I ran the exact same test
under Windows 11. What was happening here was that on Windows 10 the workload was only
running on the 4 E cores and ignoring the more powerful P cores completely,
which is why it took way longer, so hopefully that one gets patched in an update.
The next biggest differences were seen in the Microsoft Office suite, so Excel,
Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Basically if you’re running Office tasks on your machine,
the newer Windows 11 seems to offer an improvement if you’re using the 12th gen hybrid architecture.
The Corona renderer benchmark was four seconds faster under Windows 11,
not much, but still a measurable difference given the hardware was otherwise exactly the same.
DaVinci Resolve was just 4% faster under Windows 11,
while Adobe Premiere was about the same regardless of operating system choice.
Cinebench was slightly ahead when it came to single core performance on Windows 11,
but then 10 was higher for multi core, granted both are extremely small differences either way.
Geekbench was ahead on Windows 11 for both single and multicore,
but we’re talking a one to two percent higher score, nothing major.
AES encryption and decryption were essentially the same,
and then same deal in 7-Zip compression and decompression, margin of error differences.
Blender was exactly the same on both operating systems,
and the difference in V-Ray was basically nothing as well.
Handbrake is clearly standing out as an outlier when we look at the differences in
all applications tested, as it was the only one that I used that seemed to have obvious
issues and run only on the E cores, which is basically a worst possible case mistake.
If we instead remove the outlier, for the most part there isn’t a big difference outside of
the Microsoft Office applications. About half of the workloads tested were easily
within the margin of error, but for the most part in general Windows 11 was better than 10
rather than the other way around. Windows 11 wasn’t out here messing up performance.
Alright let’s check out some games next. I was originally planning on re-testing the same 10
games that I used when I recently compared the i7 against AMD, however we’re only able to look at 8
of those 10 games because 2 of them simply didn’t load up on 12th gen with Windows 10,
and these were Watch Dogs Legion and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. Now Valhalla does have known
issues on Intel 12th gen due to the Denuvo DRM. Basically it just doesn’t know how to deal with
P and E cores so it freaks out and crashes. Now this will be fixed in the future, but right now
today it means I wasn’t able to re-test those two games on this processor with Windows 10.
But despite the fact that I was still able to run those games in Windows 11,
this is a software support issue for 12th gen, so it shouldn’t really be a Windows
10 or Windows 11 thing. I think it just so happens that I was able to have it work fine
on Windows 11 but not 10. Alright enough rambling, let’s get into those benchmarks!
Rainbow Six Siege was tested with the game’s benchmark, and had the biggest difference out of
all 8 games that actually worked on both operating systems. There’s clearly an issue with 12th gen on
Windows 10, as we’re getting basically the same result regardless of whether we run at 1080p
or 1440p resolutions. I checked to see if the game was only running on the E cores or something,
like in Handbrake previously, but this didn’t appear to be the case.
Far Cry 6 also had some strange results. The difference in average FPS was only
like 3 frames or so, so it sounds like there’s only a minor change on the surface,
but check out the 1% lows. These represent the dips in performance, and they’re way lower on
Windows 10, so again something isn’t working right there and resulting in a worse gaming experience.
Control was similar, in that the difference to average FPS was very small,
but there’s a bigger more measurable gap between Windows 10 and 11 when looking at the 1% lows,
so again clearly a smoother more stable experience on Windows 11 in this game with Intel 12th gen.
Microsoft Flight Simulator was clearly doing better
with Windows 11 at the higher 1440p resolution, while 1080p was slightly ahead on Windows 10,
granted the difference was much smaller there.
Red Dead Redemption 2 was clearly ahead with Windows 11 with a 7%
lead at 1080p, though this lowers to just a 2% higher result at 1440p.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider on the other hand was a little ahead on Windows 10,
one of the few games where this was the case.
F1 2021 is another game where Windows 10 was ahead, though the difference again
is quite small, at least compared to some of the larger differences earlier.
Cyberpunk 2077 also only had small differences, a subtle lead for Windows 11 at 1080p,
though only by 3 FPS or so, while 1440p was essentially the same with either operating system.
Intel’s Core i7-12700KF was performing 7% better on average over all 8 games tested
at the lower 1080p resolution with Windows 11, though as we can see this is clearly being held
up by Rainbow Six Siege at the top. If we instead ignore Rainbow Six then Windows 11
is just 1% faster on average in the other 7 games - at least as far as average fps goes.
The difference is smaller at the higher 1440p resolution, even with all 8 games in play.
Windows 11 was just 3% faster on average, though some titles were still better on Windows 10,
but for the most part the newer operating system was doing better out of this game selection.
As we saw though, in many games the differences in 1% lows could be bigger compared to average FPS,
and arguably that’s more important as low 1% lows means either stuttering or inconsistent
results - basically just dips in performance. Generally speaking, based on these games tested,
Windows 11 was better than Windows 10 for me. Not to mention the fact that Windows 11
actually let me run Watch Dogs and Assassin’s Creed, but as I mentioned that might just be
luck. It is a known problem with 12th gen regardless of the operating system.
Obviously Denuvo DRM is garbage, but we all already knew that, so let’s move on.
If we combine the non gaming results with those gaming results we just looked at,
well, I think Windows 11 is clearly better on Intel 12th gen right now. Best case on
Windows 10 it was a little ahead of Windows 11, but for the most part they were about
the same while Windows 11 did generally offer better performance improvements.
Of course this could change entirely in future if Microsoft decide to
update the Windows 10 scheduler. But who knows whether they’ll actually do that. It definitely
wouldn’t surprise me at all if they use this as a reason to get people upgrading to Windows 11.
Personally if I was building a 12th gen system today I would just go straight
for Windows 11. As we saw, it just seems to do better in both games and applications.
I wouldn’t personally bother even attempting Windows 10 and doing an in place upgrade later,
because as Hardware Unboxed have shown in this video, that does result in worse performance.
Now that said, Windows 11 is far from perfect. I encountered all sorts of random GUI bugs while
doing my testing, and just based on that I don’t plan on personally upgrading until
early next year some time. Though that said I don’t really have the choice because I
run a Zen 1 Threadripper machine, and that technically doesn’t have Windows
11 support anyway. But even if it did, the point is I wouldn’t be upgrading just yet.
So just to be clear, if I was running any processor
that wasn’t Intel 12th gen today I’d probably just go Windows 10,
but if I was doing 12th gen I think I would just go straight to Windows 11 and deal with it.
I know others like Gamers Nexus have shown even bigger improvements in certain improvements
in Windows 10, so it clearly does depend on the specific workload being run,
but yeah just on these workloads that I find myself more personally using day to day
I think 12th gen with Windows 11 would be the best case for me.
If you want to see how Windows 10 and 11 compare
with Core Isolation on and off then check out this video over here next,
or check out this one next if you want to see how this i7-12700K compares against AMD. Not
only are both 12 core processors, but the i7 is also cheaper. Well, at least the base CPU price,
not counting the whole platform - I’ll go into all the details in that video, I’ll see you there.