It’s not even a matter of when. I was recently given an i7 6700K, and no game, old or new, comes close to fully using it, and it’s not even overclocked. If anyone is in doubt about the requirement being artificial, try this CPU.
The windows 11 cpu requirement isn’t a requirement per se but a “it’s validated to work on this or newer”. 6th gen Intel is no problem. Even 4th gen or older aren’t a problem, performance wise. The problem is the mandatory TPM 2.0 support. Intel CPUs only massively support that from 6th gen on and AMD CPUs even later (I think Zen 2). On some older boards you might have luck, especially if you buy a hardware TPM but my PC for example, running a i7 3770, only has a TPM 1.2 and no way to upgrade to 2.0. Now, there are ways to circumvent the need for a TPM all together on Win 11 but tbh, Win 10 installs perfectly well still on Hardware as old as Athlon 64 and in my experience even better than 11 anyways.
It’s a requirement both on paper and in that, even though Microsoft document an official way to bypass it, they will warn you that they do not even guarantee security updates unless your CPU is supported. Moreover, we know of at least one game, Valorant, that will not work on Windows 11 unless you are meeting its hardware requirements. The bottom line is that installing Windows 11 is a risk.
