Microsoft Flight Simulator is the hardest hit, with an 11 percent performance decrease at 1080p and an eight percent drop at 4K. The impact is more acute at lower resolutions like 1080p and generally falls to less than three percent at 4K, suggesting the culprit is a CPU bottleneck. Testing 15 PC games like Far Cry 6, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Forza Horizon 5, showed that most suffered a roughly five percent average framerate hit. Tom's Hardware tested how the security feature affects the hardware released in the last couple of years, finding that even the mighty GeForce RTX 4090 doesn't come away unscathed.

When the controversy first arose in 2021, tests showed that VBS created an almost 30 percent performance hit in the worst-case scenarios, particularly on older CPUs like 1st-generation Ryzens or 10th-generation Intels. Ultimately, each user should decide individually whether the extra protection is worth the performance hit. Home desktops that never go anywhere and have only one user might not need them as much as laptops or PCs sitting in offices. The usefulness of VBS and HVCI has been under debate and may depend on each user's situation. It also employs features like Hypervisor-Enforced Code Integrity (HVCI), which Digital Trends thinks is the real culprit behind the performance loss. VBS is an optional extra security layer that uses virtualization to isolate a corner of a PC's memory, protecting it from malicious code and drivers. Leaving it on can lower some games' framerates by almost 10 percent, though often less than one percent depending on the title. Tom's Hardware recently discovered that, at some point since the initial controversy surrounding Windows 11's Virtualization-based Security (VBS), updates have reenabled it for seemingly all Windows 11 and Windows 10 systems.

Testing shows that even the latest hardware can suffer noticeable, though not ruinous, performance penalties. If you switched it off in 2021 and forgot about it, you might want to check whether an update since then flipped it back on. PSA: Upon Windows 11's initial launch, some users complained that a default security feature significantly impacted gaming performance.

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