Even when you tell Visual Studio to "Start without Debugging" (that's the Ctrl+F5 option), it's still doing a little extra work behind the scenes compared to just clicking on the .exe file in your folder. Think of it like this:

Visual Studio is Still Watching: When you launch from VS, Visual Studio is still running and acting like a parent to your program. It might be keeping an eye on it, managing the console window, or just generally making sure everything's in order. This tiny bit of oversight adds a small amount of overhead. When you just double-click the .exe, there's no "parent" program involved.

Resource Sharing: Visual Studio itself is a pretty big program and uses up some of your computer's resources (CPU, memory). When it's running in the background and launching your program, there might be a bit of competition for those resources. When you run the .exe directly, Visual Studio isn't actively doing anything with your program, so more resources are free for your code.

So, that 12ms you see from Visual Studio likely includes a bit of "Visual Studio overhead," while the 7ms you get from the .exe is closer to the true speed of your program.