New test results have confirmed that the Windows 11 October update does indeed have a devastating impact on Assassin’s Creed Shadows frame rates. Earlier in October, many players noticed the game becoming substantially laggy compared to before. After searching for a cause, some managed to link this performance degradation to Windows 11’s KB5066835 update, as deleting it restored performance back to its original state.
Now, Digital Foundry has followed with its own analysis and confirmed the community’s theory, saying the update does indeed impact gaming performance. On top of complaints from gamers, the outlet indicates that Nvidia’s GPU driver hotfix release also raised some suspicion about the Windows update, as the GPU maker blamed the KB5066835 update for causing lower performance in some games.
Digital Foundry measured the performance difference between the problematic Windows 11 version and the one with Nvidia’s patch applied on a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and GeForce RTX 5090 system, finding 33-50% of frame rate degradation. To put this into numbers, in some cases the game ran at 34fps, when it should have been 72fps. That’s the difference between an enjoyable gaming experience and a barely serviceable one. This is more egregious when you consider that these monthly updates are usually downloaded and installed automatically, meaning you could wake up to a sluggish game without understanding the reason.
Testing uncovered that Counter-Strike 2 is also affected by this bug to some degree, which is worrying, as more games could be impacted just enough to go under the radar. While the investigation didn’t conclude who was responsible for this bug in the first place, be it Microsoft or Nvidia, Alex from Digital Foundry noted that Microsoft should have detected the bug during its testing phase, regardless.
To avoid future Windows Update misfortunes, Alex advises looking into alternative systems to Microsoft’s OS, specifically Linux. That’s not out of the question any more either. With Valve now strongly behind SteamOS, the day Windows becomes a second choice for gamers may come sooner than we expect.
