While Microsoft will only support Windows 10 until 2025, the company is continuing to improve the now-legacy platform. However, the apparent inclusion of Virtualization-Based Security (VBS) by default in Windows 10 may not excite many users. According to Tom's Hardware, this feature may be turned on in Windows 10 automatically.
If you are unfamiliar with VBS, it is native in Windows 11 by default as a security tool on the platform. Around a year ago, there was plenty of noise about how VBS may cause significant gaming performance drops when it is on.
While the concern over VBS died down last year, there are still concerns that it affects benchmarks. Tom's Hardware found that Memory Integrity was on by default in their clean install of Windows 10. To get to the bottom of the situation, the outlet run a round of testing on 15 games using four setting types and resolutions.
Test
Those tests were done on a Windows 11 PC with the AMD Ryzen 7950X3D CPU. The tests also used the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 with VBS both on and off. When the VBS setting was turned on, there was a 5% drop in performance when the game was running with 1080p resolution:
“Taking the high level view of things, perhaps it doesn't look too bad. Disabling VBS improved performance by up to 5% overall, and that dropped to just 2% at 4K ultra. And if you're running this level of gaming hardware, we think you're probably also hoping to run 4K ultra. But even at our highest possible settings, there are still some noteworthy exceptions.”
It is worth noting that all of the tests were done on Windows 11 and not Windows 10. However, it is likely that similar performance differences will be observed on Windows 10 when VBS is on/off.
Tip of the day: For the most part, Windows apps are stable, but they can still be still thrown out of whack by updates or configuration issues. Many boot their PC to find their Microsoft Store isn't working or their Windows apps aren't opening. Luckily Windows 11 and Windows 10 have an automatic repair feature for apps that can resolve such issues.
