Quick answer

Use Balanced on a gaming PC. Ultimate Performance is High performance with one change: hard disks are never turned off. I read both plans out of Windows 11 25H2 and all 164 settings left at their defaults matched on AC power. Try High performance only to test a CPU-bound stutter, and Ultimate only for spinning drives that must stay awake.

TL;DR · Ultimate Performance power plan

  • Gaming PC: Balanced. It is the plan Power mode works on, and its processor boost mode is Aggressive, the same as High performance.
  • Ultimate vs High performance: one plugged-in difference. Ultimate never turns off hard disks. High performance turns them off after 20 minutes. Every untouched AC setting on my PC matched.
  • High performance is a stutter test. It holds the processor floor at 100 percent. If the stutter in a CPU-bound game does not move, go back to Balanced.
  • Ryzen 9 9950X3D: Balanced. XDA's review says the chip calls for it and uses Game Bar for core parking while you play.
  • Where it lives: Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options, with High performance behind Show additional plans. Ultimate needs one powercfg command first.

One setting. Plugged in, that is everything the Ultimate Performance power plan changes over High performance.

I read both plans out of the registry and powercfg on my desktop, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RTX 5080 on Windows 11 Home 25H2. Then I compared them value by value. The 164 settings nobody had edited on either plan all matched on AC power. The one that differs is the hard disk timeout: 20 minutes on High performance, never on Ultimate.

So the hidden plan with the grand name does not touch the processor at all compared with the plan one click above it. It keeps spinning drives awake.

That helps a workstation full of hard drives. On a gaming PC with NVMe storage it does nothing, which is why Balanced is still my answer for games. The rest of this page gives you the plan for your PC, the exact place to change it, and what the published tests show. If what you have is a game that stutters or a GPU that sits at 60 percent, the stuttering guide and the low GPU usage guide go after the cause; a power plan is rarely it.

What each plan does

Balanced is the Windows default, and Control Panel on my PC labels it “Balanced (recommended).” Windows’ default table in the registry sets its minimum processor state to 5 percent and its processor performance boost policy to 60, so an idle CPU clocks down and ramps when work arrives. It is also the plan Power mode works on, along with any plan derived from it. Microsoft’s slider documentation says that setting “will appear on a device only when the Balanced power plan, or any plan that is derived from Balanced, is selected.”

High performance hides behind Show additional plans. Its registry description reads “Favors performance, but may use more energy.” The default table raises the minimum processor state to 100 percent and the boost policy to 100. It turns PCI Express Link State Power Management off, where Balanced uses Moderate power savings. It never sleeps. Balanced sleeps after 30 minutes. Both plans leave the boost mode on Aggressive, and on my 7800X3D both keep every core unparked on AC power.

Ultimate Performance first appeared in a February 2018 Windows 10 Insider Preview build, listed under new features for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. Microsoft’s announcement says it “builds on the current High-Performance policy, and it goes a step further to eliminate micro-latencies associated with fine grained power management techniques.” The same post says it was “not available on battery powered systems.” Its registry description is “Provides ultimate performance on higher end PCs.” On my Windows 11 Home install the template stores exactly one explicit value: Turn off hard disk after, set to 0. Zero means never.

Power mode is not a plan. It is an overlay on Balanced with three positions, and Microsoft’s support page lists them as Best power efficiency, Balanced and Best performance, the last described as “Maximizes performance.” The slider documentation adds that Game Mode “operates independently” of it.

The one setting Ultimate changes

Setting, plugged inBalancedHigh performanceUltimate Performance
Minimum processor state5%100%100%
Processor performance boost policy60100100
Processor performance boost modeAggressiveAggressiveAggressive
Core parking, minimum unparked cores100%100%100%
PCI Express Link State Power ManagementModerate power savingsOffOff
Sleep after30 minutesNeverNever
Turn off hard disk after20 minutes20 minutesNever

I read the Ultimate column from a copy made with the hidden template’s GUID. My High performance plan has edited values and so did the copy, so for any row edited on either one I used Windows’ default table, and I compared the untouched settings live. All 164 of those matched between High performance and Ultimate with the PC on AC power, the NVMe idle timeouts and NVMe latency tolerances included.

Settings agrees. With my Ultimate copy active, the Power page reads “Power mode is set automatically while the high performance power plan is used.”

XDA Developers’ March 2026 test says Ultimate “disables core parking.” True on my PC, and beside the point. High performance keeps every core unparked on AC too, and so does Balanced. Intel hybrid chips park differently, and I have not read one.

The plans do part ways on battery, in the direction the name would not suggest. Unplugged, 35 of those untouched settings differ, and my Ultimate copy leans toward saving power: energy performance preference 50 where High performance uses 0, and boost policy 40 where High performance uses 100.

On a desktop that never matters. On these values Ultimate is the less aggressive of the two on battery, though I have not read a laptop’s plans and OEM plans can differ.

A commenter on r/Windows11 reached the same reading earlier this year: hard drives are the only AC difference, and Ultimate saves more power on battery.

Which plan to use

Your PCPlanWhy
Gaming desktop with SSDs, single-CCD Ryzen or IntelBalanced, Power mode on Best performance if you want itBoost mode is Aggressive in every plan. Balanced lets the processor floor drop to 5 percent at idle and keeps Power mode in your hands.
CPU-bound game that stutters on BalancedHigh performance, as a testIt holds the processor floor at 100 percent. Play the same scene on both. No change means the stutter lives somewhere else.
Ryzen 9 9950X3DBalancedXDA’s review says the chip “calls for the Balanced power mode in Windows 11 for the best performance” and uses the Xbox Game Bar for core parking while you play. I have not tested a dual-CCD chip.
Tuning with Ryzen MasterHigh performance while you tuneAMD’s Ryzen Master guide says “Select High Performance power plan” when using Ryzen Master to maximize performance.
Laptop, on battery or plugged inBalanced, Power mode to tasteMicrosoft’s 2018 post aimed Ultimate at workstations and said it was not available on battery powered systems.
PC with hard drives that serve files, record audio or feed a VMUltimate PerformanceThis is the job it does. A spun-down drive has to spin back up before it serves the next read.
PC where Power mode is greyed outBalancedMicrosoft’s support page says a custom power plan might be selected, and to select Balanced in Power Options.

Missing plans follow the same line. Microsoft’s 2018 post says Ultimate was not available on battery powered systems, and How-To Geek’s guide says the plan can be missing “mostly on laptops, but also on some desktops.” I have read the plan on a desktop only; the battery-side values above come from that desktop copy.

How to set it

Control Panel

I opened Power Options with control /name Microsoft.PowerOptions on 2026-09-13. The address bar reads Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options, the heading says “Choose or customize a power plan,” and Preferred plans lists Balanced (recommended) with a Show additional plans button underneath. High performance lives behind that button, and so does Ultimate once you create it. Microsoft’s support page gets there through Control Panel > System and Security > Power Options.

To change one setting without switching plans, open Change plan settings next to Balanced, then Change advanced power settings. That is where the freezing guide turns off PCI Express Link State Power Management, where the USB guide disables USB selective suspend, and where the black-screen guide lengthens the display timeout.

You can fix any of those inside Balanced.

Settings: Power mode

On my desktop the page is Settings > System > Power. Microsoft’s support page, written with laptops in mind, calls it Power & battery and shows separate Power mode choices for Plugged in and On battery. Microsoft’s slider documentation says the setting appears only while Balanced, or a plan derived from Balanced, is active. With my Ultimate copy active, the Power page said power mode is set automatically while the high performance power plan is used. If the dropdown will not change, Microsoft’s instruction is to open Power Options and select Balanced.

The command line

Open Terminal as administrator. These four lines cover everything:

powercfg /list
powercfg /duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61
powercfg /setactive SCHEME_BALANCED
powercfg /setactive SCHEME_MIN

/list shows every plan with its GUID and an asterisk on the active one. /duplicatescheme creates Ultimate from the hidden template, and Microsoft’s powercfg reference says “the resulting GUID which represents the new scheme is displayed.” Pass that GUID to powercfg /setactive to switch to it. The last two lines use aliases, and the names mislead: on my PC powercfg /aliases maps SCHEME_BALANCED to Balanced, SCHEME_MIN to High performance and SCHEME_MAX to Power saver.

MIN and MAX refer to power saving, not performance. powercfg /delete with a GUID removes a copy you no longer want.

What the tests show

I did not benchmark games across plans, and after reading the processor rows I do not expect a game to tell Ultimate from High performance. Here is what other people measured.

XDA Developers ran High performance against Ultimate in four games in March 2026. Fortnite went from 101 to 108 fps average and from 72.3 to 83.4 fps in 1% lows. Cyberpunk 2077 went from 102 to 100.6, Black Myth: Wukong held at 95, and Forza Horizon 5 dropped from 118 to 114. The article names no hardware and no run count, and XDA left DLSS Frame Generation off to keep the load on the CPU. Its conclusion: “By and large, though, there was barely an effect on the way my games performed.” It makes one exception, for players who “exclusively play online multiplayer titles.” With identical processor settings underneath, I read one game up and two down as noise.

How-To Geek’s guide is blunter: “you might only see a boost of a couple of frames per second.”

The idle cost is easier to see. In a September r/pcmasterrace thread, a 9800X3D owner who swapped plans for a few weeks reported cores dropping to 2 to 3 GHz and 38 to 40 C at idle on Balanced. On High performance they sat near 5 GHz and 48 to 52 C. No frame difference showed up in Cyberpunk 2077, CS2 or Warzone. That is one user without logs. Microsoft’s 2018 post warned that Ultimate may “consume more power than the default balanced plan,” and on AC it runs the same processor settings as High performance, so I would expect the same idle cost from it.

How it interacts with the other switches

Low GPU usage. A GPU coasting at 60 percent is usually a frame cap or a CPU limit, and the low GPU usage guide sorts the two. NVIDIA’s Power management mode is set in NVIDIA’s own control panel, not in Windows Power Options. If the bottleneck calculator flags your processor, a plan switch will not close that gap.

X3D chips. On my 7800X3D every core stays unparked on AC in all three plans. The 16-core parts are different. The 9950X3D vs 9800X3D comparison covers core parking on the dual-CCD chip, and XDA’s review of it names Balanced.

HAGS and V-Sync. People flip these in the same sitting as the power plan. Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling stays on for any modern card, and V-Sync depends on your monitor. Both are separate settings from the power plan.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Which is better, high performance or ultimate performance?
I would not expect either to be faster in games, because plugged in they carry the same processor settings. Ultimate Performance never turns off hard disks; High performance turns them off after 20 minutes idle. I compared the two on my Windows 11 25H2 desktop, and every setting left at its default matched on AC power, the processor and NVMe rows included. Use High performance if you want a performance plan at all, and add Ultimate only when a spun-down hard drive costs you something.
Does ultimate performance increase FPS?
Not in any way I would plan around. XDA Developers compared it with High performance in four games in March 2026: Fortnite rose from 101 to 108 fps, Black Myth: Wukong stayed at 95, and Cyberpunk 2077 and Forza Horizon 5 both went down a little. XDA’s own conclusion was that there was barely an effect on its games, with an exception for competitive online-only titles. On my PC the two plans carry identical processor settings on AC power, which is why one game up and two down reads as run-to-run variance.
Is it okay to use the Ultimate Performance power plan?
On a desktop that stays plugged in, yes, and the price is idle heat and power. It carries High performance’s processor settings, which hold the minimum processor state at 100 percent where Balanced allows 5, and Microsoft’s 2018 announcement warned that it may directly impact hardware and consume more power than the default Balanced plan. A 9800X3D owner on r/pcmasterrace reported idle temperatures of 48 to 52 C on High performance against 38 to 40 C on Balanced, with no frame-rate difference in the games they tried.
What to do if you don’t see the ultimate performance plan?
First open Control Panel, Hardware and Sound, Power Options and click Show additional plans, because High performance hides there too. If Ultimate is still missing, open an administrator Terminal and run powercfg /duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61. The command creates a copy of the hidden template and prints its new GUID; I have a copy made that way on Windows 11 Home. Microsoft’s original announcement said the plan was not available on battery powered systems.
How do I enable the Ultimate Performance Power Plan in Windows 11?
Run powercfg /duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61 in an administrator Terminal, then open Control Panel, Hardware and Sound, Power Options, expand Show additional plans and select Ultimate Performance. You can also skip Control Panel and run powercfg /setactive with the GUID the first command printed. To go back, powercfg /setactive SCHEME_BALANCED switches to Balanced.
What is the best performance power mode?
It is one position of the Power mode setting in Settings, with Best power efficiency and Balanced as the other two, and Microsoft describes it as the one that maximizes performance. It is not a power plan. Microsoft’s slider documentation says the setting only appears while Balanced, or a plan derived from Balanced, is selected, and on my desktop with Ultimate active the Power page says power mode is set automatically while the high performance power plan is used.

Evidence ledger

Last updated
Methodology
See our methodology for research and review standards. It draws on 10 cited sources, listed below, each checked against the original page on the date above. Everything described as read on my machine was read on 2026-09-13 on my desktop: an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080, Windows 11 Home 25H2 build 26200.9445. I used read-only tools: powercfg /list, /query, /qh, /aliases and /availablesleepstates, a read of the registry under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power (the stored plan values and the DefaultPowerSchemeValues table Windows ships), and UI Automation reads of Control Panel’s Power Options window and the Settings Power page. The Ultimate Performance plan I compared is a copy made on this PC with powercfg /duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61. Several values had been edited on that copy and on my High performance plan, so for those rows the table uses Windows’ default table; all 164 settings left alone on both plans matched with the PC on AC power. Of those same untouched settings, 35 differ on battery power, and the battery values quoted are live readings of them. I did not benchmark games across plans. The frame-rate and temperature figures belong to XDA Developers and a Reddit user, named where they appear. Every source was opened live on 2026-09-13.
Sources
Update log
  • 2026-09-13 — Page updated.
Corrections
Spotted an error or a stale number? Email hello@techfuelhq.com. Confirmed corrections are added to the update log above.

About the author

Written by Lowell K. Wood IV, who builds and runs TechFuelHQ from St. Louis, Missouri.