Problem with low performance on Win11 virtual machine

[xtec]

Host is laptop 11th i5 gen 2.4 Ghz, 16 Gb RAM, SSD. Using QEMU 6.2.

Since Win10 guests, and despite being quite usable in general, I have 
always seen problems with performance in comparison to bare-metal 
installations on hosts with exact same hardware: Start Menu "animation" 
looks in general slightly "lagged", any program such as file manager, 
web browser, MS Office take a bit to open, CCleaner takes a minute or so 
to do even a couple of Mb cleaning, and most notably, cumulative updates 
from WU take around 2 hours from the moment of start downloading to the 
moment of finishing rebooting. This last thing, on bare metal, takes 
half an hour *at most*.

Tried installing Win11 guest from scratch, this time with 
"optimizations":
--Type machine: q35 with accel=kvm
--CPU: -cpu host,hv_relaxed,hv_spinlocks=0x1fff,hv_vapic,hv_time
--RAM: 8 Gb
--All virtio-win drivers in general (and qxl-dod for display)
--Network: using qemu-bridge-helper
--Disk: -drive [...],discard=unmap -device 
virtio-blk-pci,[...],physical_block_size=4096,logical_block_size=4096 
(qcow2 disk format)
--Using SPICE
--Using RAM ballooning (though currently leaving it just in the maximum, 
which is default)
--Using OVMF and swtpm
--Created disk image with qemu-img options -o 
extended_l2=on,cluster_size=128k to fit NTFS block size of 4096
--I do use QCOW2 for snapshots

Results: exactly same symptoms; no changes at all overall neither for 
good or for bad.

Is this the expected way for any windows guest to work normally on QEMU? 
Or what can I do to better optimize performance?

By the way, I also tried in Proxmox, which uses RAW disk images by 
default; saw same symptoms...

Thanks beforehand.