Windows 11’s recent preview builds include a new toggle called “Advanced Performance Extensions,” aka “APX,” and on supported hardware, it could actually make your PC run faster. According to Microsoft, letting Windows use APX allows your PC to have “better performance.”
This new hardware requirement could finally give Microsoft another opportunity to push you into buying a new PC, especially as Windows 10 is now less than a year away from the end of extended support in 2027. So far, Windows 11’s Copilot+ PCs with NPU support have done little to nothing to convince Windows 10 holdouts, and it makes you wonder if APX, or the idea of “better performance,” could change that.
Existing Windows 11 PCs can still benefit from Low Latency Profile, though, and it doesn’t need APX support.
If you haven’t seen the toggle yet, it’s because it popped up in Build 29695, released to Windows Insiders on October 23, so at this point, we are not sure when the feature will roll out in production. For consumer PCs, Intel’s upcoming Nova Lake is the family to watch.
What is Intel APX, and what are CPU registers?
Now, time for some backstory to better understand why APX even exists as a toggle on Windows 11 in the first place.
Intel has been around for several decades now, and it has continuously changed its architecture for “emerging workloads” and other requirements, such as better battery life, where Qualcomm has raised expectations. While Intel hasn’t had much luck with efficiency or even AMD-like performance, APX is another attempt to improve performance without significantly increasing power consumption.
Originally, Intel’s x86 architecture defined eight 16-bit general-purpose registers. Over time, that increased to 16 registers, each 64 bits wide. This happened long before Windows 11, which requires a 64-bit processor.
But what are these “registers”? According to Intel, registers are small but very fast storage locations inside processors, and they hold the values required for running processes. As you can imagine, if you have more values stored there, the processor needs to move fewer of them to and from memory.
APX builds on that idea. Intel introduced it in 2023, and it expands the x86 instruction set with access to more registers and other performance improvements.
“The extensions provide efficient performance gains across a variety of workloads without significantly increasing the silicon area or power consumption of the core,” Intel explained in a technical document updated in October 2024.
“Intel APX doubles the number of general-purpose registers (GPRs) from 16 to 32. This allows the compiler to keep more values in registers,” the company noted.
How APX could make Windows 11 apps faster
Microsoft and Intel are working closely to make the most of APX, and the performance improvements in Windows 11 will go beyond just OS-related areas.
Intel confirmed that APX has an interesting approach to helping apps run faster, and I am not talking about Windows 11’s recent Low Latency Profile. With APX, software can reduce some of the work the processor needs to do.
“As a result, code compiled with Intel APX contains 10% fewer loads and more than 20% fewer stores than the same code compiled for an Intel® 64 baseline,” Intel explained.
Intel also confirmed that it found 10% fewer instructions in code compiled with APX, so it could even help developers compile their apps faster. It’s one of the areas where Intel has been lagging behind. However, these figures come from a prototype, so the numbers are not final and could go either way.
This also doesn’t mean Windows 11 will run 10% or 20% faster when this change becomes available, and Microsoft hasn’t yet provided benchmark results for this toggle.
Right now, if the CPU makes the wrong guess about which path a program will take, it has to spend more time recovering and sideline other tasks it could have undertaken.
Intel says the new instructions let Windows apps avoid more of these hard-to-predict branches, and that should technically reduce the time wasted on recovery. This could improve performance in apps where these mistakes happen frequently.
However, flipping the APX switch in Windows 11’s settings won’t make every existing app faster. Intel says developers may need to update their apps to use APX. They can take advantage of it through “simple recompilation,” and “source code changes are not expected to be needed.”
Which CPUs will support APX, and will it come to existing PCs?
Windows Latest understands that Nova Lake will support APX, and Intel’s own compiler documentation confirms APX for Diamond Rapids.
| Processor family | APX support | Are you getting it? |
|---|---|---|
| Intel Nova Lake | APX is listed in GCC’s processor documentation. | An upcoming consumer CPU family expected to benefit once Windows and software support are ready. |
| Intel Diamond Rapids | Intel has documented APX support. | A Xeon server family, rather than a processor upgrade for your existing Windows laptop. |
| Intel Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake, and Panther Lake | These families do not support APX. | A Windows update cannot add the missing CPU capability. |
And yes, APX could eventually reach AMD processors too. AMD’s Robert Hormuth has discussed APX as part of its collaboration with Intel, but that doesn’t confirm a particular Ryzen model or make an existing Ryzen PC APX-compatible, so I have not included it in the above table.
Existing PCs can already benefit from the Low Latency Profile, and it could cover more of Windows
You can’t simply force-enable APX on existing PCs because it requires CPU-level changes, but Microsoft is testing other performance improvements for all existing PCs.
As you may be aware, Windows 11 now supports Low Latency Profile, which originally covered the Start menu, Search, Notification Center, and Quick Settings, before Microsoft expanded it to app launches with the August 2026 update. In Windows Latest’s tests on an existing Raptor Lake PC, apps such as Chrome, Calculator, and even the WebView2-based Weather app opened faster after the update.
Low Latency Profile is enabled by default and simply uses a brief CPU boost when you launch apps or OS-related features. You don’t need a new instruction set for that, and in our earlier tests, the difference was easier to notice on older or lower-end PCs.
Windows Latest understands that Microsoft eventually plans to expand Low Latency Profile to cover more of Windows, including file launches and OS settings.
If anything, Windows is clearly getting faster for all PC owners, and we’ll learn more about Microsoft’s plans early next year.
