A couple of weeks ago Microsoft confirmed what gamers suspected: the big 2022 update to Windows 11 was affecting the performance of high-end games. It said as much in an official bug-tracker, and delayed the rollout of the big 2022 Update for quite a few users. According to the same changelog, the issue isn’t fully resolved, but it’s now limited to only “small subset of games and apps.” So the latest update is heading out to a lot more users.
The update was spotted by The Verge, and indeed, I can confirm that my desktop with an Nvidia GPU got the Windows 11 2022 Update last night. Exactly what the problem was — is? — is still somewhat nebulous. Microsoft originally blamed the issue on games “inadvertently enabling GPU performance debugging features not meant to be used by consumers.” Based on the advice to update games and apps to the latest versions, we can infer that the problem can be solved by updates to the software itself instead of Windows.
Presumably that’s why the safeguard hold (which prevents the update from going out to users who might have issues) is now limited to a much smaller subset of users with those affected games and apps. Microsoft has yet to mark the issue as “resolved” in its bug tracker, which indicates that there’s still work to be done. Whether that work is by Microsoft itself, developers of the affected games and programs, or some combination of the two, wasn’t made clear.
