I've been hearing that these CPUs don't play nice with games right now, and they require Windows 11 to take full advantage of their power which I am not interested in running. Is there any truth to this? Would I be better off going with an 11th gen CPU?
In common vernacluar something "bad" is actually the best. That applies to alder lake.
Today, because of the superior performance per core it is very good.
Windows today, know about the slightly slower performance of hyperthreaded cores and will allocate resources accordingly.
Windows 11 takes this further. It gains knowledge of running tasks via 12th gen hardware so it can make better decisions and keep high priority tasks off of the Efficiency cores.
E cores are each somewhat equivalent to I5 6600 cores.
The gaming issue comes when certain games try to identify the processor by looking at the core that is executing. The game code needs a patch, but the issue can also be resolved by disabling the E cores in the bios.
12th gen processors are some 19% stronger than 11th.
Silly to not take advantage of that, particularly for games.
Now, all that said, I see no urgent need to change to win 11. There will be some glitches as there are on every bit of new software. I would wait a bit on windows 11 as an upgrade to a running system.
On a new system, go ahead.