I was sick of the Windows performance rollercoaster until I made these changes
Software is an incredible thing. Without changing your computer’s hardware at all, new software has the potential to offer better performance, higher quality, or both by being more efficient or implementing new methods to achieve the same goal.
Generally, I expect that a software update for any device I own will, at the very least, never make my device’s performance worse than it already is, but with Microsoft Windows, all bets are off when you hit that “update” button.
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Windows updates quietly change your system’s behavior
Although the notes for a Windows update can be quite brief, there is usually a plot things that have been tweaked under the hood. These are often boiled down to “stability improvements” or something similar, with only new features described in detail.
Yet even a small, innocent update can contain changes to how your computer schedules tasks on your CPU cores or how aggressive background services are. There could be changes in power management that affect latency or how your components can increase speeds within that power envelope.
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Taken in isolation, these changes are generally all positive. The problem is that Windows is complex, and the situation is made worse by the endless combinations of computers capable of running it. Which means it’s impossible for Microsoft to comprehensively test updates, no matter how long that update has been in beta or how carefully it phases a release. As soon as an update is rolled out to the general user base, you will find all of its failure points.
For some people this will include one or another performance regression, especially if you are on the cutting edge of supported hardware. In some cases, these regressions are massive. For example, as Digital Foundry reports, Windows update KB5066835 reduced the performance of some games such as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows up to 50% compared to before. It was NVIDIA that released a patch, but it meant many PC gamers had poor performance for at least a few days.
This is an extreme example, to be clear, but we’ve all experienced a new Windows update bringing latency, stutters, and other quirks to not just video games, but every app you use. It worked fine the day before, but the next morning when you wake up, your files are copying slowly, videos aren’t playing as they should, or your browser is now crawling for no apparent reason.
GPU and chipset drivers make things worse
I don’t want to lie down all Nor is Microsoft’s fault. After all, your motherboard chipset and GPU are important factors in system performance and stability, and these drivers are written by the manufacturer.
As someone using both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs on Windows, I really have to think twice about driver updates. New updates are often highlighted by support for the latest games, so if I want to play that game, I’m usually swayed. However, a new GPU change often leads to issues with older games that I spend most of my time playing and performance regressions in some newer games.
I’m talking about micro-stutter, frame rate issues, GPU usage issues and who knows what else. Again, the problem here is that there are millions of games (it’s probably a lot) that span the history of the PC, and some of them are going to get worse when you change drivers.
In particular, sometimes a new driver will improve performance, if you think of performance as simply a higher maximum or average frame rate. But that doesn’t take into account things like latency and stuttering. Things that significantly degrade the actual experience, even though the number is now higher.
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How I Stopped Riding the Updating Roller Coaster
On the surface, the answer is obvious, and you’ve probably been shouting it at your screen while reading this for a while now: stop updating your computer!
Except that it is terrible advice, and it’s easier said than done. There are many truly crucial updates. These are mostly security related and tend to release on their own, but stopping all updates is a bad idea. Likewise, using Windows’ default tools, you can’t stop updates, you can only delay them.
However, with a (potentially risky) registry tweak, you can delay updates for much longer than the three months you get by default, and you can still manually install critical or major updates at your discretion. What I do is delay non-critical updates for a few days, just to see if any major issues arise. If people aren’t experiencing major issues a week after a big update arrives, then I’m okay with continuing.
As for my GPU drivers, on the NVIDIA side I switched to Studio drivers, which are designed to be more stable, and took steps to prevent Windows from automatically updating device drivers. It’s a pain to manually manage my drivers, but if the reward is better stability and consistent performance, I’ll take you up on the offer.
