Intel Alder Lake On Windows 10
With Bonus Windows 11 Results With And Without E-Cores
TechPowerUp has been busy benchmarking Intel’s Alder Lake Core i9-12900K in several scenarios, including seeing what the performance difference is when running on Windows 10. Alder Lake was designed for Windows 11, as the Windows 10 scheduler isn’t up to addressing E-cores and P-cores properly. This will have an effect on performance, and they wanted to know exactly how much. While they were at it, they ran all their tests with the E-cores disabled and included those results as well.
The results are best described as mixed, with tests like SuperPi and wPrime heavily preferring Windows 10, while rendering engines such as the Unreal Engine and V-Ray preferring Windows 11. In almost every benchmark, they saw lower performance with the E-cores disabled, the exceptions being the web engine and encryption benchmarks.
As for gaming results, there is little to no difference in performance between the two OSes nor with E-cores turned off. There are a few examples in which you might eke out a handful of extra frames, but for the most part you won’t notice any difference. They also spent some time detailing how they dealt with the E-cores, worth investigating if you intend on playing with some shiny new silicon.
Intel made it clear that their 12th Gen Alder Lake Hybrid processor architecture works best with Windows 11. We wanted to see what happens when you run the new Core i9-12900K processor on Windows 10 and tested 37 applications and 10 games at 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 4K.
