Windows 11 may impact gaming performance — but don’t worry

If you’ve been wondering why your beefy graphics card hasn’t been performing as well as it should in Windows 11 or Windows 10, the answer could be Microsoft’s Virtualization Based Security (VBS). According to testing done by Tom’s Hardware, VBS could cause gaming performance to drop by as much as 10%.

In a suite of fresh benchmarks, Tom’s Hardware tested 15 different games, from Cyberpunk 2077 to Red Dead Redemption 2, both with VBS enabled and with the feature turned off. In some games, the results could be cause for concern.

In Microsoft Flight Simulator, for example, disabling VBS improved average frame rates by up to 10% when using an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card. In fact, when measuring the lowest 1% of frame rate results, the game benefitted by as much as 15% from having VBS switched off. That could translate into a noticeable increase in performance.

Microsoft explains that VBS “uses hardware virtualization features to create and isolate a secure region of memory from the normal operating system.” This helps protect against vulnerabilities and exploits that could weaken your PC’s defenses. In other words, it’s a pretty handy security feature.

However, it’s important to note that Microsoft Flight Simulator was an outlier in the results. In all other games, average frame rate increases were in the single-digit range — around 5-6% on average. While some games also saw roughly 15% increases to one-percentile results, most did not. The increase in Total War: Warhammer 3’s one-percentile score was much higher,…