Windows 11 appears to be slipping behind Linux in the performance department.
Phoronix has shared a couple of tests pitting Windows 11 Pro against various Linux distros (e.g., Clear Linux and Ubuntu) on an Intel machine and found that Microsoft’s operating system couldn’t beat them in various tests, including SVT-AV1 and LuxCoreRender, a physically based and unbiased rendering engine.
While Windows 11 was able to best Linux in some benchmarks such as LAME MP3 encoding, a mean of the test results has indicated that the latest version of Windows has lost the performance lead over its open-source alternative. Clear Linux tops the chart with a score of 55.95, while Windows 11 Pro sits at the very bottom with a mean score of 51.80.
Test system:
- Intel Core i9-12900K CPU
- ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E GAMING WiFi motherboard
- 2x 16 GB DDR5-6000 memory
- 500 GB WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD
- AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU
In more positive news for Windows users, Puget Systems shared its own tests for Windows 11 last week that suggest the operating system’s performance is steadily improving versus its predecessor. Windows 10 is beaten now by its successor in select tests, including Photoshop and Lightroom Classic under certain hardware configurations.
Windows 11 22H2, the next major version of the OS, is rumored to release in late September or October. Some of the new features that users can expect include app folders in the Start menu, system tray updates, and a new task manager app.
Last year when the Intel Core i9 12900K “Alder Lake” processor launched, Windows 11 was outperforming Linux to much surprise in general but explainable due to some late Linux kernel patches around Intel’s hybrid architecture. Back in February I looked at the situation again and Linux started outrunning Windows 11 on the i9-12900K with the latest Linux kernel at the time. But with a few more months having passed and for the Intel Alder Lake hybrid processors to mature under Windows and Linux, how do things stand now?