Microsoft has laid out its 2026 Windows 11 vision board, highlighting what the Redmond giant has in store for its operating system. According to Microsoft, the 2026 is shaping up to be a year of optimizations, as the company is now shifting towards performance delivery, alongside new features. "We're committed to making Windows the best place to play, and we will continue refining system behaviors that matter most to gaming: background workload management, power and scheduling improvements, graphics stack optimizations, and updated drivers," said Microsoft in its latest blog post.

Perhaps the most important pillar of this is the background workload management, which adds overhead to a system. Recently, we observed that the Xbox Full Screen Experience (FSE) on a regular Windows 11 build reduces background overhead, with RAM usage dropping significantly by 9.3%. Similarly, an increase in FPS of up to 8.6% can also be observed, thanks to more optimized background workload management. Features such as power and scheduling will also contribute a few percentage points of improvement, potentially making the OS overhead a negligible factor.