Windows Vulnerability CPU Meltdown Patch Benchmarked - Game related testing

Game related testing

I can already spill the beans, here you do not need to be worried. I grabbed a fairly regular GeForce GTX 1080, tested it pre-and post patch. I ran three resolution, 720p, 1080p and 1440p. To keep things a bit tidy on this page , I dropped the 1440p results as really there isn't a difference in perf. Let's have a peek.

Rise of the Tomb Raider, above Full HD results. As you can see, there is no difference in performance. However, I dropped to 1280x720 to check if there is a larger effect once we are completely free from CPU utilization.

Well, as you can see one we drop to 1280x720 we see a small shift in perf. This would be a 2% differential, is that significant? Perhaps for you, not for me though. I'd happily trade that in for a vulnerability being patched. 

Ghost Recon: Wildlands then, again at Full HD we do not see any performance difference whatsoever. Let's drop in resolution though. 

An at 1280x720 we can spot a 2 FPS difference, which rounded upwards is again 2%. 

Is it all bad negative in performance? Well, no Sir, Time Spy managed to completely f*** me over, I ran the benchmark a couple of times and after the patch was applied, Time Spy resulted in a better score.  Make note of this, I ran the ALL the pre-patch results in this article like an hour before the post-patch ones, same system, same day, same everything. 

So where is that difference spotted, well it's found in the CPU score? Really .. don't ask me how, why or what. Now when you math it back, that was 2% faster. 

Preliminary conclusion

Given what I am currently seeing, desktop users and PC gamers should not be too worried about significant performance drops. Most test results do show a negative effect on performance overall, but we're really talking in a realm of 2% differentials here. Now my remark here needs to include this, there probably will be more firmware updates and perhaps new patches for all protections to kick in, accumulated and activated these all can have an effect on performance. If that turns out to be the case, we'll have to re-do and revisit all tests. 

Update: The file IO tests have been updated with a new ASUS BIOS 1003 we do see a drop off in certain 4K performance workloads, sometimes very significant. For all other CPU/SYSTEM/MEM benchmarks, you are looking at 1% maybe 2% differentials that could even be tagged as your typical statistical anomalies.

We have confirmed this BIOS is working properly with the patch:

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-SpeculationControlSettings
Speculation control settings for CVE-2017-5715 [branch target injection]

Hardware support for branch target injection mitigation is present: True
Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is present: True
Windows OS support for branch target injection mitigation is enabled: True

Speculation control settings for CVE-2017-5754 [rogue data cache load]

Hardware requires kernel VA shadowing: True
Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is present: True
Windows OS support for kernel VA shadow is enabled: True
Windows OS support for PCID optimization is enabled: True


BTIHardwarePresent : True
BTIWindowsSupportPresent : True
BTIWindowsSupportEnabled : True
BTIDisabledBySystemPolicy : False
BTIDisabledByNoHardwareSupport : False
KVAShadowRequired : True
KVAShadowWindowsSupportPresent : True
KVAShadowWindowsSupportEnabled : True
KVAShadowPcidEnabled : True

Currently, however, if you have a reasonably modern PC and IF this patch is all there is to it, you'll be hard-pressed to notice any difference, if at all, even with an NVMe SSD and a 4K drop-off. Again I would like to re-iterate that the effect on older dual and quad-core processors with a lower frequency could be far worse, the truth here is that I do not know the effect on that just yet. But on your average modern PC, at this time, this doesn't seem to be that worrying at all. That said - I'll need to test older processors, if there's a need performance differences wise, we'll certainly report back on that. This article is aimed at gamers and Windows 10 desktop users, the results in the server / datacenter segment might look completely different, that however is not our cup of tea in expertise or demographic. In the end, please do get yourself patched up in software and motherboard system BIOS / firmware okay?

We'll update this article if applicable at any time, the result sets remain 'preliminary'. 

- H.