Microsoft's VBS/HVCI still hurts Windows 11 performance even on latest versions

When Microsoft released Windows 11, one aspect of the OS that was highlighted was its better security. Mandatory requirements like Secure Boot and Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 (or PTT / Platform Trust Technology in the case of Intel) were introduced.

Another similar feature is Memory Integrity or hypervisor-protected code integrity (HVCI) (also called hypervisor-enforced code integrity or HECI). HVCI is what allows Virtualization-based Security (VBS) on Windows. Microsoft has earlier explained why features like VBS and TPM 2.0 are so crucial and also published a demo of them. More recently, the company published a guide on how to enable Enhanced Sign-in Security (ESS) that leverages VBS and TPM for additional protection.

However, there is a cost to it: performance. Time and time again, we have seen VBS hurt the performance of CPUs, especially when gaming. This happens on supported CPUs as well, which pack Intel MBEC (Model-based Execution Control) and AMD GMET (Guest Mode Execute Trap). MBEC and GMET essentially help to hardware-accelerate VBS.

Interestingly, disabling Memory Integrity is also a recommendation by Microsoft for boosting gaming performance.

Using AMD's Ryzen 5800X3D, German news outlet ComputerBase (CB) decided to see what improvements Windows 11 24H2 brings to the Ryzen 5000 series (Zen 3). The test shows that the newest Windows version has a definite improvement over its predecessor. However, VBS continues to hamstring the OS's performance, just as it has since Windows 11 21H2.

As you can see in the charts above, the "HVCI off" figures dominate, be it in terms of average frames or percentile low figures. Overall, it looks like there is an ~8% performance penalty with VBS enabled.

For those who have not been following recent AMD performance patches and updates, the company has made branch prediction-related optimizations that are now available on Windows 11 24H2 and this leads to a healthy improvement in performance, especially on the Ryzen 9000 series. Microsoft later backported the optimizations to 23H2 as well. This is what the "23H2 + Update" data points in the above charts indicate.

Source and images: ComputerBase

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