- The best Windows ever for gamers.
At least that's what Microsoft says,
but Microsoft has made a lot of promises
to gamers over the years.
Remember when Vista was going to be the best for gaming?
Remember Games for Windows Live?
Oh, sorry.
I threw up a little.
So with Windows 11 creeping ever closer
to final release,
we felt that we needed
to give you guys some answers
you can actually trust.
Is Microsoft taking the upcoming threat
of Linux gaming seriously?
Are you really getting a better gaming experience
on Windows 11?
Or is this just a lot of hot air so they can finally
make you link your Microsoft account?
Well, I usually save my hot air
for sponsors, like AMD.
Thanks to AMD for sponsoring this video.
AMD's Ryzen 5000 Series CPUs
and Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards
enable the ultimate gaming experience
for any gamer, across any setting,
at any resolution.
Head to amdgameeveryday.com to learn more.
(upbeat techno music)
Our first step was setting up
our GPU test bench here with two SSDs.
One running Windows 10,
and the other running the latest preview of Windows 11.
Both of them were loaded with the same games,
and both were running the same version
of NVIDIA's Game Ready drivers.
This way, we've got exactly the same environment,
down to the exact motherboard
for both operating systems
and we can switch between them
without changing anything else.
Starting with a recent top end GPU,
the story is already really interesting.
Windows 11 comes in a little bit slower
than Windows 10 in "Assassin's Creed: Valhalla",
but it's close enough
that it could be a coincidence.
F1 2021 without ray tracing shows more
or less the same performance between the two OS's,
and that doesn't change
with ray tracing enabled either.
Nor does it change with "Forza Horizon 4"
or "Flight Sim 2020".
I mean, it's not like you'd expect
a big difference anyway, right?
Well you wouldn't,
but then along comes "CS:GO"
representing a legacy gaming title,
and it sees a significant reduction in performance,
losing 110 FPS on average.
So what is going on here?
Looking at the data,
CPU utilization is more or less the same,
but GPU utilization takes
a significant dip in Windows 11.
Remember guys, we're running the same hardware,
same driver, same game, same test.
We aren't thermal throttling.
So what gives?
Ah, well which CPU cores are being loaded
gives us our first clue.
Where Windows 10 seems to spread the load
across threads 0, 10, 11, and 12,
Windows 11 is splitting the load far more evenly
across threads 0 through 3,
5 through 10, 13, 15, 24 and 25.
That might sound way better.
I mean, it's spreading the load
across more of your multi-core CPU.
But remember we're using a Ryzen CPU.
So constantly crossing
between our Ryzen's chiplets
means the CPU is spending way more time waiting
on data to be pushed into cache
and less time sending commands to the GPU.
Now, I wouldn't expect nearly the same kind
of impact on a CPU with a single CCD
or on an Intel CPU,
but it's definitely something
that we're going to keep our eye
on as Windows 11 gets closer to release.
And this bad behavior seems to carry over
to the "Civilization VI" AI benchmark,
with turn times nearly a second faster
on Windows 10 on the same CPU.
This suggests then that,
while Windows 11's scheduler might
be more sophisticated than Windows 10's,
not all of its efforts are making positive impact.
At least not for gamers.
To be clear, DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 titles
that are built with multithreading
in mind don't suffer the same fate,
and DirectX 9 games are old enough
that they're going to run well enough
on any high core count modern CPU anyway.
But we still hope that this can be fixed
before Windows 11 goes gold.
Gold like the pins on our CPU pillow.
Lttstore.com.
It's very soft.
Now as for how an older GPU fares,
we chose the GTX 1060 based
on its popularity in the Steam hardware survey.
And it sees a very similar pattern across most,
but not all of our testing,
with virtually identical numbers
between the two OS's
in "Assassin's Creed: Valhalla", "F1 2021",
"Forza Horizon 4", and "Microsoft Flight Simulator".
Where we deviate from our RTX 3080's pattern
is in our "CS:GO" performance.
Here, we get pretty much the same numbers
between Windows 10 and Windows 11.
And this makes sense
because we're more GPU bound
in this scenario
because we have a less powerful GPU.
So that means that CPU scheduling
and context switching is no longer
what's holding back our overall performance.
Let's put performance aside though.
There's a lot of other reasons why gamers might want
to upgrade to Windows 11.
I mean, Microsoft wouldn't call it the best Windows ever
for gaming if it weren't, right?
Well, I mean, even with Microsoft's track record aside,
you would hope the next version
of anything would be better than the old one.
How true that is depends
on who you're talking to,
because from where I'm sitting,
there's one major advantage
that remains for Windows 11 gaming,
and that is HDR.
In Windows 10, HDR needs to be manually enabled
by the user.
And once it's on, it's on system-wide,
which means you can run
into situations where your HDR content looks great.
That is assuming you also remember
to enable HDR in the game menu,
but your SDR content,
which is everything else,
might look a little off.
Auto HDR is Microsoft's effort
to fix these problems in Windows 11.
And it actually does a surprisingly good job
of bringing HDR-like visuals
to standard dynamic range content through
automatic tone mapping.
It looks like it will legitimately
be a key selling point
for anyone who has an HDR compatible display and GPU.
The only problem is
that not everybody has such a thing
and many lower cost HDR compatible displays
are really compatible in name only.
Providing correct mapping of HDR content,
but not actually displaying content
in high dynamic range.
'Cause they just can't get bright enough.
So whether you'll actually get a better experience
on such a display is going
to depend on the content
and on the display.
And by this point we're digging
into niches within niches
to try to find Windows 11 gold.
Okay, so what about direct storage then?
That's a feature that enables your GPU
to directly read and write
from your game's install directory.
Kind of like the Xbox Series', and the PlayStation 5.
Well, funny story about that one.
It was supposed to be Windows 11 exclusive,
but after severe user backlash
against that announcement,
it's a bit of a pattern for them,
Microsoft backpedaled
and are now bringing it
to Windows 10 as well.
Although exactly what that's going
to look like is anyone's guess at this point,
because according to a Microsoft blog post,
Windows 11 has, "Storage stack optimizations."
That, "Unlock the full potential of direct storage."
Whatever that means.
We really don't know what that means,
because we still don't know exactly what
direct storage is going to do for gamers
in practice,
because no games have been built
to take advantage of it yet.
What we know is that the goal
of the technology is to achieve results similar
to what Sony showed
in their PS5 architecture demo.
So seamless open world exploration
without loading screens in between
and stuff like that.
One thing we know for sure though,
is that if you're not rocking an NVME SSD,
whether you're on Windows 10 or Windows 11,
you're going to be out of luck when it comes
to enabling direct storage.
Get subscribed by the way,
because when direct storage is ready,
we're going to be on it like white on rice.
Or white on milk?
Anyway, the point is today we're looking at beta software
and it's impossible to draw hard conclusions
like, "Don't upgrade to Windows 11."
Or, "Windows 11 will give you more FPS."
But we can make some observations.
First, as with any operating system upgrade,
you shouldn't expect miracles.
Obviously, there's going to be new optimizations,
but they're not going
to make your hardware magically better.
Whether it's brand new
or a few generations old.
And second, at the end of the day,
most people upgrade their operating systems
for new features or because they need
to do something or use a new device
that their old operating system doesn't support.
And the good news for those folks is
that Windows 10 is going
to be supported until fall 2025.
So there is plenty of time left for Microsoft
to fix things and for you
to make the jump when it's right for you.
Anthony also wrote in here
that you should just jump to Linux instead
if you're going to be jumping anyway.
And he might actually have a point.
I think he expected me to argue with him here,
but I'm trying to talk Valve
into giving us an early version
of the SteamOS that they're running
on the Steam Deck so that we could just put it
on a regular PC
and take the latest performance optimizations
and anti-cheat workarounds for a spin.
So, hey, cross your fingers with me.
'Cause I think that would make
for one heck of a video.
Just like this is one heck of a segue
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Thanks for watching guys.
Go check out our guide on installing Windows 11
if you'd like to do some pre-release testing
of your own,
which is probably not a bad idea
if you're looking to take the jump.