Windows 11 ships with three visible power plans: Balanced, Power Saver, and High Performance. There’s a fourth, hidden option — Ultimate Performance — designed for workstations. It eliminates micro-latency from CPU power state transitions and can improve responsiveness in CPU-sensitive games and applications.

What Ultimate Performance Changes

Under Balanced and High Performance plans, Windows allows the CPU to drop to lower P-states and C-states between tasks to save power. When a workload suddenly demands full CPU speed, there’s a brief (microseconds to milliseconds) ramp-up period.

Ultimate Performance sets:

Processor minimum performance state: 100% (no stepping down)
No core parking (all cores always active)
No USB selective suspend
No disk power management
No PCI Express link state power management

The trade-off: higher idle power consumption and more heat at idle. On a desktop with adequate cooling, this is irrelevant. On a laptop, it drains the battery faster.

Enabling Ultimate Performance

Open PowerShell as Administrator:

powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61

This adds Ultimate Performance to your power plan list.

Then activate it:

Control Panel → Hardware and Sound → Power Options
Select Ultimate Performance

Or via PowerShell:

# Get the GUID for Ultimate Performance (after duplicating)
$guid = powercfg /L | Select-String "Ultimate Performance" | ForEach-Object { ($_ -split '\s+')[3] }
powercfg /S $guid

Verify It’s Active

powercfg /GetActiveScheme

Should show Ultimate Performance as the active scheme.

Performance Impact

The real-world impact depends heavily on your use case:

Workload	Expected Benefit
CPU-bound games (strategy, simulation)	2–5% FPS improvement
GPU-bound games at high settings	Minimal — GPU is the bottleneck
Competitive FPS (CS2, Valorant)	Slightly better minimum frame times
Video encoding (Handbrake, DaVinci)	Minimal — already uses full CPU
Compiling code	Marginal

The biggest benefit is 1% low frame times — more consistent framing in CPU-intensive scenarios. Average FPS changes are usually small.

Additional Power Tweaks

Disable CPU Core Parking (manual)

Ultimate Performance disables core parking, but verify:

# Check parking state
powercfg /query SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_PROCESSOR CPMINCORES

# Or use the registry
# HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\
# 54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00\0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583
# Set ValueMax = 100 (minimum active cores = 100%)

Processor Performance Boost Mode

# Set to Aggressive Boost (3 = aggressive)
powercfg /setacvalueindex SCHEME_CURRENT SUB_PROCESSOR PERFBOOSTMODE 3
powercfg /setactive SCHEME_CURRENT

Options: 0=disabled, 1=enabled, 2=aggressive, 3=efficient aggressive, 4=efficient enabled.

Laptop Warning

On laptops, Ultimate Performance:

Drains battery significantly faster
Increases thermal output at idle
May cause throttling on systems with inadequate cooling

For laptops, stick with High Performance when plugged in. Switch to Balanced on battery.

Reverting Changes

# List all power schemes
powercfg /L

# Activate Balanced
powercfg /S 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e

# Delete Ultimate Performance if desired
powercfg /delete {GUID-OF-ULTIMATE-PERFORMANCE}

Ultimate Performance is worth enabling on any desktop gaming PC. The benefit is real, though modest — mainly in reducing frame time variance in CPU-sensitive scenarios. Combined with disabling core parking and setting AMD PBO or Intel Boost, it contributes to a consistently responsive system.