Windows 11 22H2, the latest rollout of the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system, seems to be off to a pretty good start. After some reported performance issues from enabling Virtualization Based Security (VBS), NVIDIA graphics users are turning up complaining of significant performance losses when triggering overlays.
Delving into details and to be understood, video games work correctly when the user starts them without further ado. However, if you decide to press “alt+R” to check the performance you are getting through the GeForce Experience overlay, you will start to experience a marked stuttering and possibly bugs with the sound. Some have reported an 87.5% loss in the number of frames per second in titles such as God of War Nordic after showing the overlay. In some extreme cases, the situation has led to the dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD), which when it appears means having to restart the computer because Windows has suffered a fatal error.
The logical thing is to think that closing the overlay returns the game to its previous state, thus recovering the lost performance after waiting a bit, but apparently not everyone finds this and more than one, in order to get back the gaming experience you’re used to, had to close the game and go to GeForce Experience settings to disable overlays entirely. It is not yet clear if the origin is in the operating system or in the driver, but all affected users have reported that it has appeared after updating to Windows 11 22H2.
Fortunately, it seems that NVIDIA is aware of the problem and has reacted correctly. What’s more, even an employee of the company has been seen on Reddit to collect data and information to help solve it as soon as possible. Microsoft’s involvement cannot be ruled out depending on the green giant’s findings, so in the end the solution may have to come from both sides, with updates to Windows 11 and the NVIDIA driver.
In case you are an NVIDIA user experiencing this issue on Windows 11 22H2, we strongly recommend disabling overlays until patches are released. Once available, we recommend opening Windows Update and the NVIDIA Driver Update Tool to apply them.
