Windows 11 by default will significantly reduce gaming performance on “pre-built” PCs

Windows 11 PCs will be one of the hottest items later this year, but for PC gamers, pre-installed PCs can experience a significant reduction in power under the factory default settings. cooperate with Microsoft.

In a new report from PCGamer, pre-assembled Windows 11 PCs will come with Virtualization-Based Security (VBS), an enterprise feature already used in PCs. Windows 10 is designed for business purposes.

As Microsoft describes it, VBS uses ” hardware virtualization features to create and isolate a secure memory area from the normal operating system. Windows can use this ‘secure virtual mode’ for storage. several security solutions, providing greater protection from security vulnerabilities in the operating system and preventing the use of malicious exploits that attempt to defeat protections.”

While it sounds laudable, this will affect your ability to play games on your PC, any layer of virtualization put into the system will seriously affect your gaming performance.

According to PCGamer testing, using VBS can reduce frame rates by up to 28%, which PCGamer says goes from the performance of an RTX 3080 card to an RTX 3070. This performance drop won’t affect the performance. PCs upgrading to Windows 11 from Windows 10 (unless you already have a VBS-enabled version of Windows 10) and will only affect new systems.

Microsoft believes this reduction in performance is a worthy trade-off for increased security.

“The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) requires virtualization-based security on Windows 10 for their devices. While we don’t require VBS when upgrading to Windows 11, we believe there are benefits to it. The security it offers is so important that we want the minimum configuration any Windows 11 PC can meet to have DoD-like security.

Working with OEM and silicon partners, we’ll be implementing VBS and HVCI on most new PCs over the next year. And we will continue to look for opportunities to expand VBS across more systems over time,” the company said.

You can quickly check if VBS is on or off by pressing the ‘Win’ key and typing ‘MSInfo32’, then at the bottom of the system panel it will show whether VBS is enabled or not.

One thing that is not clear is whether the computer manufacturers specializing in games will enable this setting when selling the machine or not.

Reference: Techradar