Huge performance difference between Windows 10 and 11.
Hi, I recently got a TUF laptop. Its specs are: Ryzen 5 7535HS, RTX 2050, 16GB of RAM, and an NVMe SSD and using the latest stable version of Eden.
I've been having performance issues with emulators, especially with Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Tears of the Kingdom, and some other Switch games.
The problem started when I tried Cemu. BOTW doesn't go above 40 FPS and often drops to around 25 FPS, which doesn't seem to be related to shader compilation. I found this strange because I've managed to run it at 60 FPS on less powerful laptops, and I've seen systems with the same specs reach those frame rates without issues.
Something similar happens with TOTK. Although I know it's much more demanding, I can barely get a very unstable 30 FPS, which is far below the performance other people report with similar hardware. The weird part is that the laptop performs exactly as expected in native PC games, even slightly better after configuring G-Helper.
I've tried practically everything: optimizing Windows, tweaking emulator settings, adjusting CPU boost behavior with G-Helper, and even performing clean installs of both W11 and W11 LTSC. At best, I only gained 2–3 FPS and a bit more stability.
A few weeks ago, I needed to install Win10 on another partition for some university software. I only installed the basic chipset and GPU drivers along with a few simple system tweaks. Out of curiosity, I tested Eden there, and TOTK immediately started running between 40-45 FPS in balanced power mode, maintaining a nearly locked 45 FPS most of the time.
Since then, I've been trying to figure out what's causing the issue on my main Windows 11 installation. I've tested different settings and even restored everything to default, but performance is still stuck around 24–30 FPS.
Has anyone experienced something similar or found a possible solution? Is this a relatively common issue with Windows 11 and emulators, or would I simply get better results using Windows 10 or Linux?
SOLVED!
Based on comments from this and other subreddits, I decided to give Windows 11 one last chance before switching to Linux.
First, I reinstalled Windows 11, but nothing changed; it still had the same poor performance. Then I did a complete wipe of the SSD and installed the system from scratch, also deleting the partition where I had Windows 10, and that's what solved the problem. With practically the same configuration, BOTW in Cemu now reaches 80 FPS, and TOTK stays stable at around 50 FPS. I don't know exactly what conflict the partitions were causing, but in my case, a completely clean install was the solution.