Windows 11 21H2 has improved some security features compared to previous deployments of the operating system. One aspect that was supposed to be beneficial was virtualization-based security (VBS), which uses hardware virtualization features to create and isolate a secure area of ​​operating system memory.

However, despite the interesting addition that VBS is, it can lead to performance issues, so tools like Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), MSI Afterburner and the like stopped working properly after the latest updateOr at least that’s what some are reporting. For example, XTU is able to show that overclocking it is disabled on a system whose configuration should perfectly support it.

The origin of the problems found with VBS, a feature also called Core Isolation elsewhere, appears to be that it blocks access to things like the Intel overclock box (MSR 150h) that are necessary for chips that support overclocking, revolting Y undervoltage. Even reconfiguring the BIOS won’t fix the situation, and even though the problems were found on MSI devices, it’s possible that they can be reproduced on devices from other OEMs as well.

VBS is not present in Windows 10, but in version 11 of the Microsoft operating system, it was enabled by default, at least initially. The Redmond giant recently decided to disable VBS and then re-enable itwhich is why some are now complaining of problems using tools like the ones in this post.

Microsoft has long taken the security of its users very seriously, but it seems that it doesn’t always hit the spot. As for VBS, it was one of the main targets a year ago when it was discovered that video games performed worse on Windows 11 than on the previous version of the operating system.

While we wait for confirmation that VBS is the source of the problems that certain overclocking and benchmarking tools are having, the reality is that we’ve been dealing with a situation for years where security wins at cost in many cases. performance. Here we can draw attention to many vulnerabilities discovered in processors, the repair or mitigation of which in a high percentage of cases leads to a loss of performance, and here the used operating system hardly matters.