Microsoft will lean on your CPU to speed up Windows 11’s apps and animations

Microsoft has heard your complaints about Windows 11 and wants to make things better. That’s been Microsoft’s message for most of this year, and the company is also doing everything it can to make sure people know what’s being improved and how.

One of Microsoft’s long list goals was to improve the performance of core Windows components such as the Start menu and File Explorer. One strategy for doing this is what Microsoft calls the “Low Latency Profile,” which will speed things up by providing an additional boost to CPU speed when users open Start or other apps and context menus.

Windows Central tested the low latency profile available in test builds of Windows 11 and observed a noticeable increase in speed and responsiveness on the same hardware compared to the current public release of Windows 11 25H2.

Some social media users criticized Microsoft for improving performance in this way, under the impression that it could increase power consumption and reduce battery life, and criticized Microsoft for relying on hardware rather than optimizing its software. Scott Hanselman, vice president of Microsoft and GitHub, responded to these complaints, saying that the low latency profile is added alongside other software optimizations and that “everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how something works.”

“All modern operating systems do this, including macOS and Linux,” Hanselman wrote of the CPU-enhancing behavior. “This isn’t ‘cheating’; this is how modern systems make applications fast: they temporarily increase CPU speed and prioritize interactive tasks to reduce latency.

Paradoxically, letting your CPU or GPU use a lot of power over short periods of time can save energy, compared to operating at a lower power level for more time. This is called “sleep racing”, and basically all modern CPUs are designed to behave this way; as long as the processor can quickly return to a lower power state after finishing its work, this improves system responsiveness and saves power.