Anyone here have Win 11 on their gaming PC yet?
Despite it being an awful time to buy hardware, I've been thinking of getting a new gaming PC soonish as my wife's 10+ y/o PC is showing it's age… Main thing I haven't decided on yet is whether to just get win 11 for it or install 10 and then maybe upgrade to 11 when support ends in 2025…
I've been reading about the win 11 security causing performance issues. It sounds like you can easily disable it (Virtualization-Based Security) and there are supposed to be fixes on the way. There's also an issue with Nvme SSDs being slower on Win 11 than they should. Apparently there's a patch for that one already… But reading about these things has made me hesitant to get Win 11 now.
I've been using Win 11 on my gaming PC for a few weeks now. I originally wanted to wait for the official rollout to existing Windows 10 owners in the first half of 2022 which was Microsoft's original plan but it seems like they changed plans because I got the upgrade offer via the regular Windows Update service on Win 10 a few weeks ago.
I've had a flawless experience with Win 11 as far as gaming is concerned. It's fine and the same thing as Windows 10.
Some things take a little time to get used to:
- The taskbar/start menu is now centered by default but you can also move it back to the left side. I got used to the centered bar much quicker than I thought I would.
- Stupid change #1: If you right click on the taskbar the only option that comes up now is "Taskbar settings". You can no longer switch quickly to the desktop or call up the task manager by clicking anywhere on the taskbar. You have to specifically right click on the start button for those options (or use the keyboard shortcuts like CTRL+ALT+DEL or Win + D, respectively).
- Stupid change #2: In the taskbar settings you can no longer choose to show all icons in the taskbar corner (very right side of the taskbar). In the "taskbar overflow menu" you now have to manually select each icon you want to show on the right side. This is a bit tedious.
- Stupid change #3: The right click context menu. I think enough has been said about it at this point so nothing I can add except agree that it is stupid.
- Stupid change #4: The start menu. Same as above. Enough has been said about it already but if I understood MS correctly then fixes are on the way to make it easier to use and navigate again.
- Disappointing: The so called "Auto HDR" feature. Contrary to what the name suggests you have to actually permanently enable HDR for auto HDR to work. I was not able to get a reasonable desktop image quality with HDR enabled on my setup (my screen is the ASUS PG43UQ with HDR 1000). I have stopped using HDR altogether because my entire experience with HDR has been a negative one. I never got the appeal anyway and I did not buy my screen because it had HDR. It's been a useless gimmick for me and I was hoping Auto HDR might somehow make it viable but it doesn't. It remains useless for me.
^ All of the above are a little annoying and tedious but no deal breakers. I'm generally content with Windows 11. It's fine and gaming is working just as well as before.
It's not a big change anyway. MS effectively decided to rename Windows 10 update 21H2 (second half of 2021) to Windows 11 for some reason.
It's still Windows 10 with some really stupid usability-hampering changes just for the sake of changing stuff but on a whole it's only an incremental update.