Software is an amazing thing. Without changing the hardware of your computer at all, new software holds the potential to provide better performance, quality, or both by being more efficient or implementing newer methods of achieving the same goal.
In general, I expect a software update for any device I own to, at the very least, never make the performance of my device any worse than it already is—but with Microsoft Windows all bets are off when you push that “update” button.
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Windows updates quietly change how your system behaves
While the notes for a Windows update might be pretty terse, there are usually a lot of things that have been tweaked under the hood. These are often boiled down to “stability improvements” or something similar, with only new features being spelled out in any detail.
Yet, even a small and innocent update could contain changes to how your computer schedules tasks across your CPU cores, or how aggressive background services should be. There could be tweaks to power management that affect latency or how your components can boost speeds within that power envelope.
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In isolation, these changes are all generally for the better. The problem is that Windows is complex, and it’s made worse by the infinite combinations of computers that can run it. Which means it’s impossible for Microsoft to comprehensively test updates no matter how much time that update spends in beta or how carefully it staggers a release. The second an update rolls out to the general user base, you will find all of its failure points.
For some people, that’s going to include one or another performance regression, especially if you’re on the trailing edge of supported hardware. In some cases, those regressions are massive. For example, as reported by Digital Foundry, the KB5066835 Windows update tanked performance in some games such as Assassin’s Creed: Shadows by up to 50% compared to before. NVIDIA was the one to release a hotfix, but it meant quite a few PC gamers had poor performance for at least a few days.
This is an extreme example, to be clear, but we’ve all experienced a new Windows update bringing latency, stutters, and other weirdness not only to video games, but to any application you use. It was working fine the day before, but the next morning, when you wake up, your files are copying slowly, videos aren’t playing back as they should, or your browser now crawls for no apparent reason.
GPU and chipset drivers make it worse
Credit: Patrick Campanale / How-To Geek
I don’t want to lay all the blame at Microsoft’s feet either. After all, your motherboard chipset and your GPU are important factors in system performance and stability, and those drivers are written by the manufacturer.
As someone who uses both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs on Windows, I really have to think twice about driver updates. New updates are often headlined by support for the latest games, so if I happen to want to play that game I’m usually swayed. However, a new GPU diver often means issues with the older games that I spend most of my time playing, and performance regressions in some newer games.
I’m talking microstutter, frame-pacing issues, GPU usage issues and who knows what else. Again, the problem here is that there are millions of games (probably, it’s a lot) spanning the history of the PC, and some of them are going to get worse when you change your driver.
In particular, sometimes a new driver improves performance, if you think of performance as simply a higher peak or average frame rate. But, that doesn’t take things like latency and stutter into account. Things that significantly degrade the actual experience, even if the number is now higher.
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How I stopped riding the update rollercoaster
On the surface, the answer is obvious, and you’ve probably been shouting it at your screen while reading this for a while now—stop updating your computer!
Except, that’s terrible advice, and it’s easier said than done. There are many updates that are genuinely crucial. These are mostly related to security, and they tend to be released on their own, but stopping all updates is a bad idea. Likewise, using the default tools on Windows, you can’t stop updates, you can only delay them.
However, with a (potentially risky) registry tweak, you can delay updates by far more than the three months you get by default, and you can still manually install critical updates or major updates at your discretion. What I do is delay non-critical updates by a few days, just to see if any major issues crop up. If people aren’t experiencing major problems a week after a big update lands, then I feel OK about going ahead.
As for my GPU drivers, on the NVIDIA side, I’ve switched to the Studio Drivers, which are designed to be more stable, and I’ve taken steps to prevent Windows from auto-updating device drivers. It’s a pain to manually manage my drivers, but if the reward is better stability and consistent performance, I’ll take that deal.
