VBS can gobble up over 25% of graphical performance.
Microsoft has been making a point of Windows 11 being some permutation of “the best Windows ever for gaming“. But it seems there may be a bit of a string attached to that claim.
As PC Gamer reports, the new security features in Windows 11 can drop your frames in game by up to 28% on prebuilt PCs. Which, if you’re the kind of person that buys a prebuilt to avoid having to deal with the GPU market getting screwed by crypto miners is probably not great news.
The reason for your shiny gaming performance winding up in the toilet is Virtualization-Based Security (VBS). It’s a feature that was actually introduced in Windows 10, which uses hardware and software virtualization to fend off malware. Per Microsoft:
Virtualization-based security, or VBS, uses hardware virtualization features to create and isolate a secure region of memory from the normal operating system. Windows can use this “virtual secure mode” to host a number of security solutions, providing them with greatly increased protection from vulnerabilities in the operating system, and preventing the use of malicious exploits which attempt to defeat protections.
The plus is that this is a feature mainly meant to protect devices owned by companies, so it’s really only a feature on for enterprise versions of Windows 11. So if you plan on upgrading to Windows 11, you’re fine. The same if you’re doing a fresh install; as a matter of fact, you’d have to go out of your way to enable it under either of those circumstances. That said, if you buy a machine with an OEM build on it, you might be in for a bumpy ride.
As Dave James of PC Gamer found, the performance drop isn’t uniform, and varies from game to game. Far Cry New Dawn seems to keep trucking with only a 5% drop, but it’s the only one. Horizon Zero Dawn? 25%. Shadow of the Tomb Raider? The above-mentioned 28%.
So if it’s a problem for you, you may have to start dabbling in the dark arts and pray to the Nvidia gods. You know, if you weren’t doing that already.
Source: PC Gamer
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