VBS is enabled by default after a clean install of Windows 11, but not when upgrading from Windows 10. "In our testing with pre-release builds of Windows 11," UL tells us, "a feature called Virtualization-based Security (VBS) causes performance to drop.
When it updated us about Windows 11 support being baked into its full benchmarking suite of products, it made note about this performance-damaging security feature. Why is that interesting? Because it was actually UL who brought this issue to our attention. Interestingly, the 3DMark Time Spy score only dropped by 10%. But Horizon Zero Dawn drops by some 25%, Metro Exodus by 24%, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider by 28%. We've tested a selection of games on the current release build of Windows 11, with VBS off and VBS enabled (though not actually running) and the impact is obvious.įar Cry New Dawn is the outlier here, which barely shrugs at VBS, with just a 5% reduction in frame rate. Memory: 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4-3200| Graphics card: Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti Founders Edition Motherboard: MSI MPG Z490 Gaming Carbon WiFi And we will continue to seek opportunities to expand VBS across more systems over time." "In partnership with our OEM and silicon partners, we will be enabling VBS and HVCI on most new PCs over this next year.
"While we are not requiring VBS when upgrading to Windows 11," explains the post, "we believe the security benefits it offers are so important that we wanted the minimum system requirements to ensure that every PC running Windows 11 can meet the same security the DoD relies on. I expect you already know about the requirements for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM 2.0), but this post also talks about VBS, and the company's desire match the Department of Defense and its demands for Virtualization-Based Security enabled as standard. In a post from late August, the one which reintroduced the PC Health Check app for Windows 11 Insiders, Microsoft again talks up the enhanced security features of the new OS. The issue comes if you're receiving a machine which has had an OEM build of Windows 11 installed on it. It's a feature mainly intended for enterprise customers to be able to lock down the corporate PCs they drop into their offices and make sure they don't get compromised.Īnd if you're upgrading from Windows 10 to Windows 11 then you don't have to worry about VBS being enabled, unless you were already running an enterprise version of the older OS, that is.