Windows 11 25H2 update might disappoint if you were hoping for better performance, new report suggests

• Windows 11 25H2 has been put through its performance paces
• Based on a suite of 40 benchmarks, it won't be any faster than 24H2
• In fact performance is a dead heat, but that's to be expected, as 25H2 is a minor update that's not making any big changes

Windows 11 25H2 won't be any quicker than version 24H2 in terms of its general performance, according to some fresh testing – although this shouldn't come as a surprise.

Phoronix.com, a site focused on all things Linux, conducted a raft of testing (flagged by Tom's Hardware) comparing the performance of Windows 11 25H2 to different flavors of Ubuntu, as well as baseline tests of Windows 11 24H2.

We must, of course, bear in mind that Windows 11 25H2 isn't out yet, so this comparative benchmarking is using the preview (almost finished) version of the OS (and I'll come back to that point).

The tests – which spanned some 40 different benchmarks of various applications, including LuxCoreRender and Intel Open Image Denoise – show that Windows 11 25H2 has identical performance to version 24H2 based on the average of the results.

Ubuntu Linux was around 15% faster than the Windows versions in this battery of tests, in case you're curious.

The benchmarking was carried out with fresh installs of these operating systems using stock settings on a PC with a Ryzen 9 9950X processor and 32GB of RAM.

Analysis: no performance uplift yet, but a more responsive OS may not be far off

Of course, this is a preview version of Windows 11 25H2 as noted, so it's not fully finished just yet. That said, it's almost done – indeed, the newest flavor of Windows 11 is now in its final testing phase, and likely to be released next month. So, realistically there won't be any meaningful difference in performance levels between the current Release Preview build in the last stages of testing and the finished version of Windows 11 25H2.

This is no surprise, though, as Microsoft has already made it clear that Windows 11 25H2 is a minor update. We'll get some new features, of course, but not many of them – it's not exactly clear what'll make the cut yet. Under the hood, though, the operating system remains pretty much identical – and that's exactly what the dead heat in the performance stakes that we see here indicates.

While it's a tied game in terms of the average of this suite of benchmarks, it should be noted Windows 11 25H2 actually loses (to the tune of a percentage point or two) in some tests and wins by a nose in others to make things average out, of course.

At any rate, if you were hoping that Windows 11 25H2 might cure some of the hiccups around responsiveness that you may have experienced with 24H2 or improve overall performance, you can forget that idea.

However, Microsoft is at least working on bolstering Windows 11's performance levels in a new scheme with testers of the OS whereby logs are kept when a PC experiences sluggish performance. The hope is that'll help Microsoft diagnose and resolve issues around slow performance in Windows 11 in a timelier manner, so fingers crossed that works out to be the case.

With this year's update being a small one, the likelihood is that in 2026 we will see bigger changes from Microsoft – maybe even Windows 12 or whatever the next iteration of the desktop operating system will be called – but I personally think we'll be waiting longer for that next-gen version).

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