The rollout of the major Windows 11 2022 (22H2) update hasn’t gone too smoothly, and now there’s another issue to report: Microsoft says some users may experience “lower-than-expected performance in some games.”
This is the latest entry list of known issues (opens in a new tab) managed by Microsoft (via Computer player (opens in a new tab)) and this is described as games slowing down or stuttering while playing. If you’ve noticed this since installing the update, you’re not alone.
According to Microsoft, this is because some games and apps “inadvertently enable GPU performance debugging features that are not intended for consumer use” – so it’s a built-in Windows 11 feature that gets enabled when it shouldn’t.
Can you fix it?
Microsoft has stopped rolling out the 22H2 update to machines it believes may be vulnerable to the bug, but if you’ve already installed it, the official advice is that updating affected programs and games to newer versions “may” help problem.
Beyond that, Microsoft says it’s “working on a fix and will provide an update in an upcoming release” – in other words, you’ll have to sit back and wait for the fix to be included in a future Windows 11 patch.
You may still be able to roll back to a previous version of Windows 11 while Microsoft cleans up its code: in Settings, select System, then Recovery, then Go back to revert to the software version without the 22H2 update applied.
Analysis: bumps in the road
When you update millions of computers, it’s inevitable that some of them will run into some problems – but the goal is always to make sure those problems are as small as possible and affect as few devices as possible.
That being said, it’s hard to judge how common this problem is Reddit thread about the issue (opens in a new tab) attracted hundreds of comments, we suspect that this issue will affect a significant number of games.
We have previously reported that a significant proportion of users experienced game performance issues after applying the 22H2 update to their PCs, and it seems likely that this is the same group of issues now officially recognized and confirmed by Microsoft.
Given that this major update also caused problems with printers and Windows Hello, Microsoft will hope to fix this gaming issue as soon as possible – otherwise Windows 11 OS usage will remain low.