Surely you still have the controversy with this topic in your retina. Microsoft and its Windows OS penalized gaming performance for a security feature called VBS. Luckily, this can be turned off and return to the performance it was before, or won if it was never turned off. The new problem is that now it has been detected that Microsoft activates it by default and that, somehow, deactivating it implies that those of Redmond activate it again silently. New data shows that we can earn up to 10% performance in gaming if we again disable VBS in Windows.
The call Virtualization-based securityeither VBS for its acronym in English, returns to the attack, where we will also have on stage another old man known as the HVC. Well, even if you have disabled them, Microsoft is turning them back on and you may not have noticed.
Windows 10 and Windows 11 turn on VBS and HVCI without your permission
It doesn’t matter if you just formatted or haven’t done it for years. Microsoft in some update of its OS has reactivated these two features by default in total silence. The news comes from Tom’s Hardware, where, while preparing the analysis PC to carry out some tests, they detected abnormal performance in the data provided by the equipment.
It doesn’t matter which version Windows 10 and Windows 11, even the Home are facing it the same. Logically this may be influencing certain reviews that, at some point, were able to disable VBS, but after a silent update by Redmond this feature has been enabled.
But how much performance do you get to lose with it now? Well, they have proposed to measure it with a TOP team such as a i9-13900K with 32 GB of DDR5 at 6,600 MHza 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD and a whole RTX 4090. Basically, the best hardware that you can buy today and the least bottleneck it will have as a PC in general. The results are discouraging to say the least…
15 games tested, four different combinations and… A 10% loss
Under Windows 11 and after testing with VBS On vs VBS Off, in four different resolutions, the data is disparate and goes more for specific titles than anything else. The average differences, except for those of a higher degree, are really small, ranging from +0.X% to 5%-7% on average.
The worst thing is not the GAP that is achieved, that there are cases like Flight Simulator in 1080p with +11.2% in favor of the Off setting, but the fact that the lower the resolution we have and the fewer settings, that is, the lower the load graph, the greater the loss.
Of the 60 scenarios tested in Average FPS, only in two there is a performance in favor of VBS On and for the minimum (-0.2% and -0.1%), which could perfectly fall within the margin of error of the measurement. . The other 58 values are favorable to VBS Off, that is, they gain performance with the setting disabled.
The biggest problems come when instead of the Average FPS we look at 1% Low, because the figures are much higher and more substantial, achieving that FPS is gained out of the 60 scenarios in all of them. We see incredible values such as +37.7% in Total War Warhammer 3 at 1080p, or +16.8% in Far Cry 6 at 4K, and in general, it is difficult to see numbers with a zero in front of them.
Security vs performance with Windows and VBS in gaming
In short, and although VBS is a success in terms of security, the performance penalty on a home PC for gaming is so high that it is probably worth disabling it and boosting the FPS. The average profit ranges between 5% and 10% According to the scenario, that being something free and that in 10 minutes we will see the results, it is more than understandable that many launch to disable it.
Remember that those processors and systems that do not have TPM 2.0, by definition, will never have VBS active, since this system is necessary to support it, so they will not have lost any performance. An advantage for not being able to install Windows 11, which, on the other hand, is not showing itself to be superior in gaming compared to Windows 10.
