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LabRat [soylentnews.org] writes:

Despite Microsoft's claims that "if you're a gamer, Windows 11 [pcgamer.com] was made for you" you will need to watch out for future prebuilt PCs with the new OS factory installed. That's because the Big M is enabling more security features in PCs by default, and one in particular can seriously tank gaming performance.

In our testing, that can add up to as much as a 28% drop in average frame rates. And you thought the TPM 2.0 restrictions were a pain...

That sort of frame rate delta is like dropping down an entire tier of graphics card and, in these days where GPUs are so hard to come by, Microsoft gimping the performance of the chip in your newbuild machine would surely be hard for gamers to stomach.

The issue is Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), a setting introduced into Windows 10 which uses hardware and software virtualisation to enhance the security of your system. It basically creates an isolated subsystem that helps prevent malware from screwing your PC.

Microsoft explains [microsoft.com] it as follows: "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."

Why is that interesting? Because it was actually UL who brought this issue to our attention. When it updated us about Windows 11 support being baked into its full benchmarking suite of products, it made note about this performance-damaging security feature. And that's when I started benchmarking.

"In our testing with pre-release builds of Windows 11," UL tells us, "a feature called Virtualization-based Security (VBS) causes performance to drop. VBS is enabled by default after a clean install of Windows 11, but not when upgrading from Windows 10. This means the same system can get different benchmark scores depending on how Windows 11 was installed and whether VBS is enabled or not.

"We plan to add VBS detection to our benchmarks in a future update to help you compare scores fairly."

[...] The thing to note, though, is that VBS is not enabled by default for all clean installs of Windows 11. I downloaded the latest ISO version of the OS in order to check VBS out on our test rig, but had to do some registry editing, and BIOS tweaking, in order to actually enable it. So, it's nothing to be concerned about if you're just grabbing a Windows 11 download for a fresh install yourself.

Another setting to tweak in the registry.

Original Submission