Windows 11 25H2 is not yet available, but this has not stopped the media from comparative tests of the upcoming version of Windows 11. Phoronix Tested Windows 11 25H2 against the upcoming Ubuntu 25.10 Canonical, Ubuntu 24.0.3 LTS and Windows 11 24H2 in a comparative battle from the very beginning to check if 25H2 provides modern performance improvements. Unfortunately, Phoronix tests showed that 25H2 was unable to exceed 24h2, even technically losing to the predecessor in many tests.
Four operating systems have been tested using Ryzen 9 9950X in combination with 32 GB of DDR5 memory. Phoronix compared various applications (41 reference points in total), including Luxcorerender, Embree, Intel Open Image Denoise, Ospray and Indigobench.
If you know the previous tests of Phoronix Windows vs Linux, it should not be surprising that Ubuntu went upstairs. In 41 reference PHORONIXE Geomean, both versions of Ubuntu managed to exceed Windows 11 25H2 by about 15%, respectively. Looking only at Windows operating systems, 25H2 provided exactly 0% more performance compared to 24H2 in the entire Phoronix apartment, average.
Individual PHORONIX numbers for each comparative test have further developed with a disappointing maintenance of 25H2 capacity. Many individual reference points show 25h2 and 24H2 competing with third and fourth place, with 24H2 commercial blows from 25H2. For example, in Luxcorerender Windows 11 24H2 was 2% more productive than 25H2. But in the ASTC 5.0 25H2 encoder there was almost 2% faster than 24h2.
Extremely disappointing performance benchmarking Windows 11 25H2 is not surprising. The upcoming version of Microsoft Windows 11 is based on the same service branch as 24h2, which means that both versions are largely identical under the hood. In fact, Windows 11 24H2 already has many 25H2 functions contained in a disabled state. 25H2 only turns on these disabled functions and guarantees their availability, and 24H2 users will have to wait for these functions to be enabled over time. It is far from 24h2, which was a sedate review through 23H2, including the main parts of the operating system, which are prescribed in rust.
As a result, 25H2 is also one of the smallest “main” updates that Microsoft has created for Windows 11 so far. 25H2 only contains a handful of modern functions, while removing some existing functions, such as PowerShell 2.0 and Windows Management Instrumentation Line. 25H2 will also be delivered as a switching package, requiring only one restart of updates from 24h2 to 25H2 (similar to the standard update cumulative).
