Why gamers should avoid the Windows 11 2022 update | Digital Trends

When you update Windows, there’s always a chance something will happen to throw a wrench in the works. This time, though, it seems like the Windows 11 22H2 update is causing major issues for gamers equipped with Nvidia graphics cards.

According to numerous posts across social media, Reddit, and Microsoft’s own support forums, users are seeing noticeable drops in performance while playing games after updating their computers.

A man sits, using a laptop running the Windows 11 operating system. — Windows 11

For instance, user emay007 posted in the Windows 11 sub-reddit saying, “I just updated to 22H2 and I am dealing with extremely unstable FPS in all my games. I have good specs for gaming and have previously never seen any issues (Ryzen 3600, 1070 TI, 16GB RAM). Games are basically unplayable.”

That was echoed by ChoPT, who stated, “I was having serious performance hitches, both on the desktop and especially in gaming (this completely broke Gsync as well). Drops to ~30fps randomly from ~120, in non-graphically intense tests. Screen tearing like crazy.”

Right now, there isn’t an immediate fix. However, several users have reported that rolling back the update fixed the problem for them. For now, that’s just anecdotal evidence though and might not work for everyone.

The problem doesn’t seem to be affecting AMD or Intel GPU users, suggesting it might be related to the way the Windows 11 update interacts with an Nvidia driver. That idea was seemingly backed up by Nvidia’s Software QA Manuel Guzman, who asked Reddit users to fill in a driver feedback form so that Nvidia can explore what might be happening. Hopefully, that will lead to a swift fix being issued. For its part, Microsoft has not yet issued a remedy.

It’s not the first Windows 11 bug that has had a significant effect on performance. We’ve seen AMD users suffer similar game-draining problems, Windows 11’s TPM slowing down Ryzen CPUs, and File Explorer bugs that siphon off your memory.

If you’re finding your game performance has suffered a heavy setback after installing the Windows 11 22H2 update, you might want to roll back to the previous version and see if that helps. Unfortunately, there’s not much else to do but hang tight and wait for a fix.