Poor PC performance in 2025 leads to Windows 11 vs Windows 10 culprit speculation

PassMark, a popular and reliable benchmarking software, unlike UserBenchmark, has shared some interesting data regarding the performance of Windows PCs in 2025. On its official X handle, the firm shared data that shows a significant downtick in average CPU performance trend.

When sharing this result, PassMark is a bit baffled by the figure as something like this has not happened before, leading to speculation of what may be the reason, including the move from Windows 10 to 11 perhaps leading to lower performance, or the addition of more potential bloatware in the latest systems.

For those wondering how PassMark obtains these numbers from its PerformanceTest baseline scores that are uploaded by users running the benchmark, the company explains:

This graph showing year on year performance is made up of thousands of PerformanceTest benchmark results and is updated bi-weekly (i.e. every two weeks). The chart is composed of data from PerformanceTest V5 to the V11. PerformanceTest V8 (released 2012) was the first version to collect single thread performance.

.. This graph counts the baselines submitted to us during these time period and therefore is representative of CPUs tested during this time.

Despite Microsoft's best efforts to convince that Windows 11 is faster than Windows 10, even citing somewhat silly paid studies, Neowin did not find any notable improvements on 11 vs 10, neither on an in-place upgrade nor a clean install. In fact, Windows 10 often came out on top.

We also repeated the same exercise recently for Windows 11 24H2 vs 23H2 to see the kind of progress Microsoft is making.

By digging more into the details, PassMark noticed that the majority of people are not going beyond eight cores and seem to be content with that level of performance.

To be fair to users, most games still fail to utilize beyond 16 processor threads and the rising popularity of high-resolution gaming also means that the CPU is less of a bottleneck.

On the non-gaming side, a lot more software nowadays is reliant on hardware acceleration that the GPU can provide which again means that higher core count CPUs probably don't make the most sense.