Microsoft Confirms Windows 11 22H2 Is Causing Game Performance Issues On Some PCs

Microsoft often has a hiccup or two after some initial releases of its ubiquitous operating system. The 2022 update to Windows 11, labeled 22H2, is no different. Unfortunately for some consumers, the issues are with gaming performance, but Microsoft is aware of the issue and working on it.

Microsoft, however, was not the first one to notice performance issues. AMD customers noticed issues on their brand new Ryzen 7000 processors. In other instances, GeForce GPUs have been affected by the update. This is especially frustrating given that this latest version of Windows 11 is supposed to include numerous upgrades for the gaming experience.

According to Microsoft's Known Issues page under Release Health, there is "Lower than expected performance in some games." The page points out that some affected games are being thrown into a GPU debug version intended for developers, not end users. Debug versions are often more inefficient than release or production versions as they incur additional logging, more performance metrics, and data gathering. This in turn will make those games operate with lower framerates and less desirable performance.
In some cases, there have been some performance improvement tweaks consumers can do, such as these that managed to gain us an extra 5FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. In addition, it is always a good idea to ensure your GPU driver is up to date.

The page for Release Health goes on to state that, while the distribution of 22H2 has been increased, devices with known hardware issues have been intentionally prevented from receiving the update. If you are in an enterprise environment using Update Compliance, the company advises to safeguard IDs 41766570 and 41990091. Anyone who is experiencing issues and already has the update is told to update to the latest version of the game or reach out to the game developer for additional support.


As of right now, there is no estimated time on when this issue with Windows 11 will be resolved. There is also no word on if it's going to continue to rest on games developers, we sure hope not. If security is your concern over gaming performance though, we still typically advise updating to the latest security updates at least.