5 ms·

Windows 11 24H2 no longer runs on processors without SSE4.2

39 points by skilled 2y ago

Loranubi 2y ago
Windows 11 (the UI/shell at least) is so unbearably slow that nobody would want to run it on older devices anyway.
- vintagedave 2y ago
  I agree, and this puzzles me. How can something that has existed since Windows 95, almost thirty years ago, be _changed_ to be so slow? I get rendering changes: taskbar buttons are squares without text now, it uses transparent effects, etc. Or the Start menu having different containers inside, though I'd still expect each UI container to behave speedily. What I don't understand is the delay clicking in the search field, or why right-clicking a taskbar button has a perceptible moment before the context menu appears. What have they changed? Is it built with one of their new UI .Net layers, or WinUI3? Is it a custom menu implementation that someone wrote without thinking they reinvented the wheel? What on earth is going on?
  - neonsunset 2y ago
    If only it was built using .NET and WinUI, chances are it would've not been so slow (though I did hear complaints about WinUI not prioritizing .NET enough...lots of C++-only mindshare there, and Windows teams have been decimated many times by all kinds of restructuring from what I heard anyways, not expecting much) Also a fun one: There are two cloud drive clients, one uses WinUI and is snappy using ~100MiB of RAM, another one is written with React Native and uses ~250MiB of RAM. Which one is written by Apple and which one by Microsoft?
    - vintagedave 2y ago
      I’ll guess :) The snappy non-React but WinUI one is by Apple?
- NBJack 2y ago
  I got hit by this fact hard on the first (and only) device I upgraded, a Surface Pro 6. Second(s) lag on just opening the Start menu with nothing else running, long delays when loading the file Explorer, I suffered through it for a bit just assuming it was "warming up" with post upgrade operations. After suffering through it long enough, I downgraded it back to 10 with a fresh install and it felt like a different device. I feel a little bad for Microsoft. They clearly believe they have to find new things to add to their OS for the sake of adding things and justifying the upgrade. And this is likely just from teams that want to show impact (i.e. keep their jobs). Win 10, for all it's faults, has served me well. I'd be happy to continue using it for a long time. But that doesn't make the stock price go up.
  - chiph 2y ago
    Try disabling the Bing integration. Add DWORD registry key and value DisableSearchBoxSuggestions = 1 to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer Classic case of a network call being slower than staying on the local computer (someone in Redmond should have known better)
bobmcnamara 2y ago
> This is the second system requirement added to Windows 11 since it first came out. False. The requirements were published well ahead of these, and the compiler configured accordingly. Run unsupported configurations suffer unsupported ISAs.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lambdaone 2y ago
I was about to be outraged about this until I RTFA and saw that this is a 20 year old CPU feature. Just for once I think it's worth cutting Microsoft some slack on this.
- Sakos 2y ago
  I don't understand the outrage by some people. The Sandy Bridge has popcnt and SSE4.2. If you're using anything older than that, you owe it to yourself to come out from under that rock and treat yourself to a Sandy Bridge or newer. It can't be understated how underpowered and obsolete these CPU's or how outdated these platforms are in regards to connectivity or featureset. You'd also be doing your electricity bill a favor. I've tried Windows 10/11 on a Pentium M and Core Duo and Core 2 Duo. It's abysmal performance-wise and honestly in every other way too.
  - anthk 2y ago
    I tried Trisquel Mini on a Core Duo and Ungoogled Chromium with git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters ' config for Chromium based browser. They can browse the web with Ublock Origin sending all the ADs and bloated JS to /dev/null, watch 720p videos and 1080@30, run Street View as a JS+WebGL test (OpenGL 2.1 support it's more than enough for lots of tasks), use Libreoffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Inkscape, IM with Telegram... Seriously, stop defendng crappy software. Windows 10 feature wise is not that different to a Windows 2000 machine with MS Office 2003. If should run screamly fast under a Core Duo, yet it throws out a perfectly fine machine to the trash. The Dual Core machine from my SO it's far faster than my first AMD Athon with 256MB, a machine I could run Kopete and KDE3 on it doing far more than a base W10 machine minus the resolution: 1024x768 vs 1280x720. Not so different in the end.
    - Sakos 2y ago
      I'm not defending anything. I'm describing reality. Pre-Sandy Bridge hardware is hot garbage. Every time I have to deal with one of those systems with only USB 2.0 (or worse), I want to cry. If people want to hang onto their K6, they're free to use whatever Linux distro still bothers supporting it, because even that is becoming more difficult nowadays. There's no reason to use this stuff. It's crap. If you're satisfied with crap, that's more your problem than Microsoft's or anybody else's. I know I'd never subject anybody I love to that kind of PC hardware. But yeah, shoot the messenger. What a fucking waste.
anthk 2y ago
If you cut out all the crap and unneded services on top of Windows 10 and Windows 11, I'm pretty sure a 2GB machine without a SSD could run it well enough. If ReactOS implemented the security policies from Windows under it, evan a machine with a GB of RAM could run it pretty well, I'm sure. If Trisquel Mini, akin to Lubuntu 22.04 but libre, runs under 2GB fast enough, I don't get what the hell would be W10 doing to crawl under an HD by just staying idle without anything being open.
- nubinetwork 2y ago
  Not sure about W11, but the machines we have at work will run W10 with 3gb of memory just fine.
- bobmcnamara 2y ago
  You've just described Windows Embedded.
shaggie76 2y ago
We've struggled with justifying raising the min spec for our game over the last decade and recently pushed up to 4.2 as well. Historically the question was always one of which optimizations we would be able to 'compile in' (rather than detect and use if available) and it has been increasingly difficult to justify in recent years: a few ops in 4.1, one op in 4.2, but nothing dramatic and we still can't rely on F16C support yet. These days, the move to exclude older processors seems more designed to avoid headaches from failing older hardware and performance complaints from systems that might technically qualify for your minimum spec but can't offer a satisfying user experience than it has to do with the software being able to take advantage of instruction set extensions.

39 points by skilled 2y ago

Loranubi 2y ago

Windows 11 (the UI/shell at least) is so unbearably slow that nobody would want to run it on older devices anyway.

vintagedave 2y ago
I agree, and this puzzles me. How can something that has existed since Windows 95, almost thirty years ago, be _changed_ to be so slow? I get rendering changes: taskbar buttons are squares without text now, it uses transparent effects, etc. Or the Start menu having different containers inside, though I'd still expect each UI container to behave speedily. What I don't understand is the delay clicking in the search field, or why right-clicking a taskbar button has a perceptible moment before the context menu appears. What have they changed? Is it built with one of their new UI .Net layers, or WinUI3? Is it a custom menu implementation that someone wrote without thinking they reinvented the wheel? What on earth is going on?
- neonsunset 2y ago
  If only it was built using .NET and WinUI, chances are it would've not been so slow (though I did hear complaints about WinUI not prioritizing .NET enough...lots of C++-only mindshare there, and Windows teams have been decimated many times by all kinds of restructuring from what I heard anyways, not expecting much) Also a fun one: There are two cloud drive clients, one uses WinUI and is snappy using ~100MiB of RAM, another one is written with React Native and uses ~250MiB of RAM. Which one is written by Apple and which one by Microsoft?
  - vintagedave 2y ago
    I’ll guess :) The snappy non-React but WinUI one is by Apple?
NBJack 2y ago
I got hit by this fact hard on the first (and only) device I upgraded, a Surface Pro 6. Second(s) lag on just opening the Start menu with nothing else running, long delays when loading the file Explorer, I suffered through it for a bit just assuming it was "warming up" with post upgrade operations. After suffering through it long enough, I downgraded it back to 10 with a fresh install and it felt like a different device. I feel a little bad for Microsoft. They clearly believe they have to find new things to add to their OS for the sake of adding things and justifying the upgrade. And this is likely just from teams that want to show impact (i.e. keep their jobs). Win 10, for all it's faults, has served me well. I'd be happy to continue using it for a long time. But that doesn't make the stock price go up.
- chiph 2y ago
  Try disabling the Bing integration. Add DWORD registry key and value DisableSearchBoxSuggestions = 1 to Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer Classic case of a network call being slower than staying on the local computer (someone in Redmond should have known better)

bobmcnamara 2y ago

> This is the second system requirement added to Windows 11 since it first came out. False. The requirements were published well ahead of these, and the compiler configured accordingly. Run unsupported configurations suffer unsupported ISAs.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lambdaone 2y ago

I was about to be outraged about this until I RTFA and saw that this is a 20 year old CPU feature. Just for once I think it's worth cutting Microsoft some slack on this.

Sakos 2y ago
I don't understand the outrage by some people. The Sandy Bridge has popcnt and SSE4.2. If you're using anything older than that, you owe it to yourself to come out from under that rock and treat yourself to a Sandy Bridge or newer. It can't be understated how underpowered and obsolete these CPU's or how outdated these platforms are in regards to connectivity or featureset. You'd also be doing your electricity bill a favor. I've tried Windows 10/11 on a Pentium M and Core Duo and Core 2 Duo. It's abysmal performance-wise and honestly in every other way too.
- anthk 2y ago
  I tried Trisquel Mini on a Core Duo and Ungoogled Chromium with git://bitreich.org/privacy-haters ' config for Chromium based browser. They can browse the web with Ublock Origin sending all the ADs and bloated JS to /dev/null, watch 720p videos and 1080@30, run Street View as a JS+WebGL test (OpenGL 2.1 support it's more than enough for lots of tasks), use Libreoffice, Abiword, Gnumeric, Inkscape, IM with Telegram... Seriously, stop defendng crappy software. Windows 10 feature wise is not that different to a Windows 2000 machine with MS Office 2003. If should run screamly fast under a Core Duo, yet it throws out a perfectly fine machine to the trash. The Dual Core machine from my SO it's far faster than my first AMD Athon with 256MB, a machine I could run Kopete and KDE3 on it doing far more than a base W10 machine minus the resolution: 1024x768 vs 1280x720. Not so different in the end.
  - Sakos 2y ago
    I'm not defending anything. I'm describing reality. Pre-Sandy Bridge hardware is hot garbage. Every time I have to deal with one of those systems with only USB 2.0 (or worse), I want to cry. If people want to hang onto their K6, they're free to use whatever Linux distro still bothers supporting it, because even that is becoming more difficult nowadays. There's no reason to use this stuff. It's crap. If you're satisfied with crap, that's more your problem than Microsoft's or anybody else's. I know I'd never subject anybody I love to that kind of PC hardware. But yeah, shoot the messenger. What a fucking waste.

anthk 2y ago

If you cut out all the crap and unneded services on top of Windows 10 and Windows 11, I'm pretty sure a 2GB machine without a SSD could run it well enough. If ReactOS implemented the security policies from Windows under it, evan a machine with a GB of RAM could run it pretty well, I'm sure. If Trisquel Mini, akin to Lubuntu 22.04 but libre, runs under 2GB fast enough, I don't get what the hell would be W10 doing to crawl under an HD by just staying idle without anything being open.

nubinetwork 2y ago
Not sure about W11, but the machines we have at work will run W10 with 3gb of memory just fine.
bobmcnamara 2y ago
You've just described Windows Embedded.

shaggie76 2y ago

We've struggled with justifying raising the min spec for our game over the last decade and recently pushed up to 4.2 as well. Historically the question was always one of which optimizations we would be able to 'compile in' (rather than detect and use if available) and it has been increasingly difficult to justify in recent years: a few ops in 4.1, one op in 4.2, but nothing dramatic and we still can't rely on F16C support yet. These days, the move to exclude older processors seems more designed to avoid headaches from failing older hardware and performance complaints from systems that might technically qualify for your minimum spec but can't offer a satisfying user experience than it has to do with the software being able to take advantage of instruction set extensions.