Windows 11 scores varied wildly

[alexatkin]

Just updated to 11 Release Preview (likely very little difference from the retail release at this point) and I'm only scoring 38183 CPU Mark when on Win10 it was 46477.

Now if I can only find the screenshots I took before to see which tests specifically are coming up short. I can see single thread performance is within run to run variance at least.

[David (PassMark)]

Seems unlikely that you had the Intel Power Management Driver installed with a Ryzen CPU.
The other two steps can have a negative consequences.
If you turn off all the power throttling, the machine will run very hot all the time, use a lot more electrical power and be far nosier.
If you blindly disable all background services other software might stop working.

[dataffer]

I to have had low cpu scores on Windows 11 compared to 10. I am running a AMD 5950x and in Windows 10 I was getting 49000+ to 50000+. Now i'm getting 44000 in Windows 11. I went to this page and followed the methods they described for slow cpu performance. The link is below. I didn't do method 3 or method 5 though. It helped!! Now my CPU Mark is again in the 49000+ range. I also have PBO Enabled. Try the steps outlined and see if it helps.

FIX: CPU Not Running at Full Speed in Windows 10. - wintips.org - Windows Tips & How-tos
https://www.wintips.org/fix-cpu-not-running-at-full-speed-in-windows-10/

[mp5allstar]

Well i am glad i wasn't crazy!

[David (PassMark)]

Problem has been reproduced and is being looked into. No idea of the cause at this point. (Power control throttling, thermal throttling, cache flush, some background task being triggered, ...... lots of possibilities)

[GameRoof]

Sounds great, best of luck with finding the cause eventually haha

[David (PassMark)]

We aren't sure what the cause is.

Would be interesting to hear if other people see the same effect. To see if it is related to particular hardware, particular drivers, or something else.

Locally, we are back into COVID lockdown. But once that is passed we'll setup a couple of additional physical machines with Win11 to test.

[mp5allstar]

Just did testing after my computer was running for an hour:



...and then I redid JUST the Prime number test:


Nothing else changed within the ~1-2min between these tests besides grabbing coffee in between. which again all the other numbers above are 10-15% less than Windows 10, but the prime number score is 4-5x from its peak..

[GameRoof]

Here is the breakdown of my 2D score on Windows 11, but I don't know my Windows 10 breakdown anymore so I would have to reinstall Windows 10 in order to check that. If I get some spare time to do so I will certainly post the breakdown from W10 here, but hope this is helpful. I am on an RTX 3060 Ti FE. The 3D score is normal (slightly above average of the card).

[David (PassMark)]

much lower 2D score (665 vs 1014) on Windows 11

Maybe it's all the extra processing power required to draw those rounded corners on all the windows?
Do you have a break down of the individual 2D results?

We'll see if AMD knows anything about the Prime number.

[GameRoof]

I have noticed this possible issue as well. It is definitely directly caused by Windows 11 in my opinion. I am using a Ryzen CPU similar to the OP, but I am on a Ryzen 5 5600X. My prime number score specifically is lower by a significant, even huge margin (35 vs 135). Sometimes it will be okay and bench at the expected ~135, but most of the time it is at around 35. The cause is definitely not related to thermals from what I can see, or RAM (my RAM is running in dual channel and has the same scores as it did on W10). The issue occurred on a squeaky clean install of Windows 11 and hasn't improved over time. All other elements of the CPU test show better than average scores for my CPU, it's just the prime number score dragging it down on W11.

I also have a much lower 2D score (665 vs 1014) on Windows 11. However, 3D score, disk mark, and memory mark show no noticeable difference from W10 and are good.

[David (PassMark)]

The Primes and Physics tests use a bit more RAM than the other tests. So any bad RAM setup will impact performance.
However bad RAM setups (e.g. single channel mode rather than dual channel, or bad timings) tend to stay bad. They don't jump between good and bad.

Example
https://forums.passmark.com/performa...ormance-solved

3rd party software can also stuff things up from time to time
https://forums.passmark.com/performa...ath-tests-help
https://forums.passmark.com/performa...0177#post50177
(but those symptoms don't match this case)

[mp5allstar]

Understood. Then it must be either an application or a driver that is not optimized with Windows 11, as your VM will more or less eliminate those possibilities. To narrow down the issue I will have to uninstall all my applications or reinstall Windows 11, then conduct a performance test after every application installation. I am not 100% sure if i will do that, but if i do i will post my results.


I just redid my CPU Passmark, and the issue with the prime numbers is low again. I will see if there are any processes running in the background that will kill my DiskMark and Prime Number Scores.

[David (PassMark)]

So we did a quick test here.

This was with a Ryzen 9 5900x CPU. But running in a VMWare with just 4 Cores allocated to each VM. So far from a conclusive and comprehensive test. But enough to show that there isn't some systematic CPU performance issue that effects all systems all the time.

Win11 was slower in all cases. But only by a very small amount (unnoticeable to the user). If it is just intermittent background activity causing this, taking the max of several short run samples tends to minimize the impact. The two bottom images show this. So I don't think Win11 has done anything to the hardware setup, but it may well be the case that there is some extra background load.

[David (PassMark)]

If this was true (Win11 hurts CPU & disk performance) it would both be unexpected and pretty big news in the IT world. I suspect there must be some sensible explanation for this. e.g. different power saving setting, additional Win11 background activities for a few hours, like rebuilding the Windows search index.

We run some tests today to see what our results are. We only have one Win11 machine at the moment. So it won't be conclusive.