Earlier this week, PCWorld published a roundup of Windows 12 rumors translated from PCWelt that does not meet our editorial standards. We’re deeply embarrassed by it, and I personally apologize that the article was published. It should not have been, but we’re keeping the article live (with an editor’s note at the top) so it remains in the public record.
Windows Central published a response detailing its errors. Thanks for keeping us accountable, guys — genuinely. In the same spirit of accountability, I want to explain how this happened, and what we’re doing to ensure a mistake like this never occurs again.
Let’s start by discussing how PCWorld handles translated articles, and then I’ll dive into the issues with the article itself.
I get all that, they’re all very good points. I had windows tuned to the best of my abilities, I try to use windows whenever possible at home because I manage windows servers professionally and it’s helpful to get as much hands on time with the platform as I can. But this was such a dramatic difference out of the box that I’m going to stick with it for now at least. I’m not willing to invest the time into tweaking windows to run this well (if I even can) and it’s a dedicated gaming rig so many of the “Linux on the desktop” complaints won’t apply to my use case.
Mostly I’m shocked that getting significantly improved performance when running through a compatibility layer was even possible. I expected proton to be almost as good as native. In this instance it ended up being a huge improvement.
Yeah. Wine/Proton is an incredible achievment. DirectX->Vulkan translation is a miracle by itself.
EDIT: Also, stripping Windows is not daunting. It comes down to:
Install it fresh.
Don’t install anything unless something absolutely doesn’t work without it.
Delete apps you don’t need, like (say) Xbox.
Tweak the power profile to minimum 0%/maximum 100% CPU, if it isn’t already.
Run a Windows debloating script.
Disable realtime AV.
(Optional) auto-undervolt your GPU with MSI Afterburner’s curve optimizer.
…And that’s about it, really. There’s tons of other Windows performance mysticism, but it’s (mostly) either very situational, or straight up nonsense.
Thanks for the tips but I’m a very experienced windows user, I did all of that immediately after install lol. To put it in perspective, my first step after installing bazzite was to join it to my personal AD domain that lives on my hyper-v cluster. If there’s something I could have done to get this performance on win 11 it would have probably been significantly more complicated and time consuming than any of the basics.