So I spent pretty much all day yesterday
doing testing and benchmarking to get to the bottom of this
because I've seen
a bunch of different articles popping up talking about how Windows 11
hobbles gaming performance.
It ruins it all because of a feature called VBS, virtualization
based security in Windows 11.
And the source of this all seems to be one article by PC Gamer where the guy on
one computer on his particular computer found that some games perform
28% less in terms of FPS with it on versus off.
Now, after seeing that, I was a bit suspicious because 28% seems huge.
And the whole reason that Windows
11 has the CPU requirements it does is because all the newer CPUs
have hardware acceleration called MBEC which accelerates virtualization features.
So it's less impactful.
So it doesn't make sense that it would be that huge.
So, long story short, what I'm going to explain
is that basically all these articles talking about how devastating
VBS is to gaming performance is pretty much fake news.
So I did my own testing to see for myself.
I did like 500 data points, 36 different benchmarks.
And, of course, I'll show you those results.
And then also we can go over some other results from other news outlets.
And I'll put the timestamps in the description.
But I do highly recommend you watch the whole video,
because I'm going
to get into much more detail about what this virtualization based security
and all this other stuff does.
So you can actually have some context and make a decision about it
for yourself instead of just relying on reading headlines.
Now, for the record,
I'm not saying that PC gamer and that journalists are being dishonest.
I'm not saying that they didn't actually get those results. I'm sure that they did.
And I'm not even saying that their testing was flawed.
I'm just saying that their results are not consistent with any other VBS
testing that I have seen from myself that I got or other articles.
So I believe something else must have been going on
on that particular computer that caused that change. Not exactly.
Just VBS, because the spoiler is pretty much everything I've seen.
And even my own testing you'll see, is that VBS does have a small impact
on CPU performance, not necessarily always real world performance.
But it's like 4-5%.
Nowhere close to the 20 to 30%
that was in that PC Gamer article that is getting spread around and so much.
And actually, I personally saw no drop in FPS effectively.
There were some underlying stats that did suggest that under the hood,
there were some reductions in CPU performance, and we'll go over that.
But in real world for the FPS effective result, there was nothing.
So anyway, my whole point is I'm not going to criticize people for doing benchmarks
and getting a result.
My point is that if you know
that you have a pretty big outlet that people are going to read
and you only do a sample size of one, and then go into the article
and declare in the title that it hobbles gaming performance...
And to also say in the article
that Microsoft is gimping the performance of the chip.
This is a harmful idea to put out there without confirming it
with additional testing, because VBS is an important security feature.
It can reduce malware, I think, by like 60% are the stats out there.
So now there's really no going back on it.
A bunch of people out there already think that this VBS feature
is going to reduce their performance on their computer.
They're not going to read any other articles about it.
And they're going to automatically go in, disable it without thinking,
without hearing anything more about it,
even though it's not true to the degree that this article said.
And that specifically is true because I did the exact same test
with Tomb Raider, which is the one that the PC gamer had the biggest drop on.
I had effectively no drop.
So that at least means that it is not always the case, that it's a 20% drop.
In my case, it was a 0% drop.
And I'm not even saying that my test is the right one and theirs is wrong.
All I'm saying is we need to figure out exactly what are the cause
and what are the circumstances under which you might get a 28% drop.
But it's certainly not all the time.
So before we even get into the benchmarks,
I do want to clear up a bunch of mistakes that I saw other articles making,
not even related to the performance thing, but just VBS in general.
So I'm definitely not just picking on PC Gamer here.
For example, PC World has an article where they say the feature called Memory
Integrity enables or disables VBS which is simply not true.
Memory Integrity is a sub-feature within VBS.
Toggling Memory Integrity simply toggles memory integrity, not VBS.
Now, again, I honestly don't really blame people for mixing up all these acronyms.
There's a whole bunch of them.
So I am going to give you guys a crash course on all these different terms.
So you can wrap your head around it, just like I had to spend
a lot of time to wrap my head around it. So buckle up.
So starting off VBS, virtualization based security, as Microsoft puts
it, virtualization based
security or VBS uses hardware virtualization features to create
and isolate a secure region of memory from the normal operating system.
So it just kind of creates
a very highly protected part of the memory that malware and stuff can't access.
Now, VBS is kind of like the top level umbrella feature,
and it can be used in several different ways.
And I'll give you some examples in a second.
Another term you might see
is core isolation, which apparently, from my understanding,
is basically just a marketing term for VBS virtualization based security.
So I believe they're the same exact thing, not 100% sure on that,
but it seems like that based on how Microsoft describes it.
And then there's another term virtual secure mode or VSM, which also is VBS.
So you can see how things are a little bit confusing.
Alright now next, according to this article by Microsoft,
virtualization based security has three sub-features that use it.
So the first one is Hypervisor Code Integrity - HVCI,
remember this one because this is memory integrity.
The same exact thing, HVCI is memory integrity,
that toggle in the Windows settings.
And what this does is prevents attacks from inserting malicious code
into high security processes.
So just remember that this memory isolation,
HVCI is a sub-feature of VBS.
You can toggle this on and off separately, and it won't affect whether or not
VBS is on or off.
However, it does require that VBS be on in order
to do memory isolation because it is a sub feature.
Alright now going back to the article.
The other two sub
features of virtualization based security are called Kernel Mode Code
Integrity or KMCI and Local Security Authority - LSA.
But those are beyond the scope of this video.
I'm not going to explain them just if you happen to see them
that's that's what they are.
Finally, there's the term device guard you may see, which is not a feature
in itself, just a set of features related to virtualization security.
Again, I'm just going to list these out. I'm not going to explain what they are.
If you do want to read more about them I'll put the link to the article
in the description.
And those primary features in device guard are configurable code integrity,
VSM protected code integrity and platform and UEFI secure boot.
All right. So now that you know what the heck all those
different acronyms and terms mean.
Let me quickly go over a couple articles
where they did do pretty good benchmarking properly,
and then we'll go into my own benchmarking.
So Tom's Hardware did a article where they did
pretty darn in-depth testing and they correctly differentiated
between VBS off, VBS on and VBS with memory integrity on as well.
And what they saw was relatively consistently around
a 4-6% drop with the absolute highest being around 8%.
And some as low as about 1%.
And this included shadow of the Tomb Raider where PC gamer got that 28% drop.
It was nowhere close to that here.
There's also a German site computer Base where they also did the same testing,
where they differentiated between VBS off, on, and with memory integrity.
And again, there was a pretty consistent drop, but nothing crippling.
However, there were tests, I will point out,
where there was a major drop from enabling HVCI
or memory integrity, but not from just VBS alone.
And specifically, those were 3D mark time spy,
which is basically the same result for VBS on and off.
But with each HVCI dropped 25% and with the game
F1 2020 again same VBS on and off score pretty much.
But HVCI caused a 20% drop.
So I have no doubt that there is some special circumstances
where certain virtualization features being enabled can cause a big drop.
But it's certainly not all the time.
Alright so now on to my benchmark testing.
I'm going to first explain in pretty much as much detail as I can
how I did the test.
So if you want to review it or maybe replicate it or something
and even point out some flaws in my testing, you can fully do that.
And because PC gamer had
Tomb Raider as the worst result, that's the one that I decided to do.
But again, my tests are not to be 100% conclusive either
because I am only on one computer doing one game benchmark.
I just wanted to make sure to counteract their terrible result
and show that that is not always the case.
Now, the computer I did the testing on was a origin PC laptop.
It's not new. It's only an Eighth Gen i7-8700K.
And that's basically the oldest generation possible for Windows
11 for official support.
There's only a few seventh gen ones that are.
So considering this is
one of the oldest possible generations of officially supported Windows 11 CPU's,
if I'm going to get a bad result, it's probably going to be on this one.
This CPU was overclocked to 4.6 GHz at the factory by Origin PC themselves.
The memory is 32GB of RAM at 2400 MHz, it's dual channel.
The GPU is a GTX 1080 on the latest drivers, 472.12.
It's running on a hard drive, not an SSD, but that shouldn't matter
if the tests are being loaded into the memory first.
I had the power profile set to high performance,
so the frequency is going to be just constantly at the highest.
And also, I even did a complete factory reset of the computer using the Windows
Reset PC feature.
So there's not any kind of third party OEM bloatware on there.
And it's also the latest Windows 11 release build 22000.194.
And as for the testing, I ran the benchmark a total of 36 different times.
So there were three different configurations, whether VBS was off, On
or VBS on with Memory Integrity aka HVCI.
Then for each of those, I did four different graphics settings in the game.
So those were 1440p on high, which was the default,
and also the native resolution there was also 1440p on low.
1440p Lowest settings.
And then the last one was the lowest settings
and I dropped the resolution to 720p and the purpose of this
was to try and get different levels of GPU and CPU bottlenecking.
So on the high setting, it was bottlenecked 99%, basically a 100% GPU
and on the 720p lowest settings, it was 0% bottlenecked by the GPU, all CPU.
And then for every one of those, I ran the test three times to get an average.
So that's a total of 36.
And there were 15 different variable results in the benchmark.
So times that by 36 and you get 540 data points.
All right, now for the results, there's kind of a lot here to go through
So bear with me.
All right. So first and foremost,
what was the FPS drop between VBS Off, On, and HVCI?
Well, it was effectively zero, but the other tests were not so simple,
We'll get to those. Now, let me explain what you're seeing.
Each group of bars was for a different graphics setting, so high, low, lowest
or lowest, 720p, and then off means that VBS was off.
VBS means only VBS was on.
And HVCI means that VBS and HVCI, a.k.a.
Memory Integrity were on.
And we can see that with high and low it was almost exactly the same.
There's no drop on lowest, there was a drop of one to two frames.
But honestly, I think that's probably just experimental error.
And then on low 720p, the results did kind of vary a lot.
That could be because it was 100% CPU determined.
Maybe there was other stuff going on in the background of Windows
that caused some variables,
but certainly there seems to be no kind of causal drop from VBS.
Now, next up, if we also look at the GPU bound percentage,
it may explain some things.
So on high, we can see that it was completely GPU
bottlenecked and on low it still was overwhelmingly like 85%.
So it makes sense with it
being so GPU bound that any slight drop in CPU performance
is not going to make a difference, because that's not the limiting factor.
Now, on the lowest setting, things get a little bit more interesting.
So up until now, you may have been wondering
if I was even doing the tests right. There was like no difference.
But here, we very clearly can see a difference between VBS off and on.
It went from a 70% GPU bottleneck down to 55% and then stayed about there for HVCI.
So what this at least suggests to me is that we probably shouldn't even expect
any kind of performance drop at all unless it's CPU
bottlenecked in the first place.
And even then, in that case,
it really didn't show much of an effect, if at all, in the FPS.
Because if we also look at the lowest on 720p, this is not GPU bottlenecked at all.
And somehow the FPS actually went up with VBS and then back down with HVCI.
I have no clue what that's about.
I assume there must
be some kind of other factor, maybe again, Windows background processes, whatever.
But I guess that kind of goes to show, at least in this test,
there are other factors that were way more important than toggling VBS.
Now, before we get into the most
interesting CPU stats, let me very quickly go through the GPU stats.
Now, from my understanding, this basically shows how many FPS the GPU
would be able to handle if there were no other bottlenecks.
So that seems about right on high where it was 100% GPU bound.
The average GPU FPS is the same as the real FPS that came out.
And we can see here that none of the tests were affected at all
by VBS or HVCI, which is expected, because that's a CPU thing.
The only outlier you will see here, that's because one of the tests
where I guess the GPU just had a higher max FPS for some reason,
the other two tests for that configuration were back
closer to what you would expect.
But either way, that outlier didn't affect the average FPS enough for it to matter.
All right. Now, let's take a look at the other two
categories having to do with CPU performance.
And these are CPU game and CPU render, and these are probably the most interesting.
Now, my understanding of these is that CPU game is the processor
thread that kind of calculates non graphics related stuff, maybe like the AI,
user input, general game stuff, whereas the CPU render stat
is for the thread that prepares frames to basically tell the GPU what to render.
And again, the actual numbers basically say how many frames
the CPU is able to do, ignoring other bottlenecks.
And that seems about right, because on 720p, the CPU game average
FPS is the bottleneck and that FPS is roughly
the same as the real FPS, maybe minus some overhead.
Now, again, that's just my understanding
based on what I read, I could be not fully accurate on that.
Let me know if I am.
I'll put a pinned comment or something to correct it.
But either way, it's going to show CPU performance.
So for CPU game, across all the tests,
we do see a very slight drop in CPU performance.
Mostly this is just when enabling VBS.
And occasionally there is an additional drop with HVCI.
And no matter what the test is,
if there is a drop, it's pretty freakin consistently around 3-5%.
The only bigger difference was for minimum and maximum FPS,
but that's the worst and best case that might only be for like one second.
So, of course, that's going to be a little bit more volatile.
The 95th Percentile stats are again back to around 5%.
But again, I will point out that even though there was this drop in potential
CPU performance, none of that translated into real FPS performance.
Now, next, for the CPU render stats,
it's pretty much a similar story with even less of an impact, perhaps.
I mean even the worst minimum and maximum FPS impact was only about 6% here,
whereas on the game one, it was like 11% difference.
So the conclusion I draw based on these results, which I will again
emphasize, is one computer and one game, that for this particular scenario,
VBS had a negligible performance hit.
And considering that, for the stats where I did see a drop in performance,
the kind of behind the scenes one, which were about 4-5% or so.
Those are pretty consistent with any other kind of test
that I saw other outlets doing with the same type.
So that leads me to believe that in general, VBS on Windows
11 is going to have a negligible impact on gaming performance.
In my opinion, I consider 5% performance impact to be negligible,
because I think that there's probably going to be
a lot more factors going on in your computer,
background tasks, whatever you installed, that are going
have a just as big impact as turning on VBS.
So it's definitely not something that I would worry about.
And it's definitely not
enough of a performance drop to sacrifice the pretty good
extra security you get from this important security feature.
Now, if virtualization based security or memory integrity are causing
massive drops in performance
for some games, for some people, which I don't doubt is happening,
I think we need to do more
research and figure out, OK, what are the exact circumstances this happens?
It could be driver bugs.
Maybe it could be part of the game software, whatever.
Maybe they're all using certain logic in the programming, something like that.
But I don't think we should go out and make articles talking about
how VBS on Windows 11 ruins games, just
scatter-shotting how bad it is when that's clearly not the case.
So hopefully now you'll know
to not believe all the different clickbait headlines and also be able to interpret
some of the different benchmarks that these outlets are doing.
If they are really good, you'll actually know what the heck you're looking at.
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