An Analysis Report
December 31, 2025
Sometime around March, Windows 11 crossed the halfway mark on Steam's hardware survey. More than half of PC gamers running Microsoft's latest OS now. You'd never know it from the forums though—scroll through any gaming subreddit and you'd swear Microsoft personally broke into people's homes and sabotaged their rigs.
So I spent a while digging through what actually happened this year. Not the outrage, not the PR spin. Just the facts about Windows 11 and gaming in 2025.
KB5066835 Update: How Microsoft Broke NVIDIA Gaming Performance
October 14th. Microsoft pushes update KB5066835. By the 16th, NVIDIA users are flooding forums with reports of tanked frame rates. We're not talking minor stutters here—people saw their FPS cut clean in half in games like Assassin's Creed Shadows and CS2.
Here's what made it particularly frustrating: monitoring tools showed everything looking normal. GPU utilization sitting at 99%, temps fine, but power draw mysteriously down by a hundred watts. The cards were being throttled behind the scenes while Windows acted like nothing was happening.
Microsoft's response? Nothing. Five weeks of absolute silence.
It wasn't until November 19th that NVIDIA released hotfix driver 581.94. Think about that for a second—a GPU manufacturer had to patch around an operating system bug. Their release notes didn't mince words either:
"Lower performance may be observed in some games after updating to Windows 11 October 2025 KB5066835."
Pretty damning statement from a partner company.
Digital Foundry ran tests with a 9800X3D and RTX 5090—problem confirmed, NVIDIA's fix worked. Similar verification came from Windows Latest, guru3D, BleepingComputer, The Register. This wasn't Reddit hysteria.
Worth noting: AMD and Intel GPU owners saw different issues—sluggish File Explorer, laggy taskbar—but not the catastrophic FPS drops. Windows Latest tested an AMD 7900 XTX and gaming ran fine. This one hit NVIDIA silicon specifically, and only with certain game engines.
Here's what bothers me: I couldn't care less whether it "only" affected NVIDIA users or "only" certain titles. Microsoft shipped a broken update to over a billion devices, watched their users troubleshoot in the dark for five weeks, and said nothing. When NVIDIA—an entirely separate company—has to clean up your mess, that tells me everything about your priorities. Bugs happen, I get it. But the radio silence? That's a choice. And it's a bad one.
Windows 11 Update History: A Pattern of Gaming Issues
October wasn't a one-off. This keeps happening.
May and June brought Fortnite and CS:GO performance problems. Microsoft acknowledged them in a support doc... on July 22nd. The actual fix? Didn't land until August. Three months for popular games to run properly again.
The 24H2 update from December 2024 managed to break Auto HDR and crash games outright. Bad enough that Microsoft halted the rollout entirely.
That same October update I mentioned? It also killed localhost for IIS developers, triggered BitLocker recovery loops, and quietly disabled File Explorer's preview pane—supposedly for security reasons, but without bothering to ask.
The thread connecting all this: Microsoft switched from yearly feature updates to monthly ones. They branded it "Continuous Innovation." Reads great in a press release. In practice, it means less testing, faster shipping, and when things break? The fix is months out because they're already sprinting toward next month's update.
DirectStorage on Windows 11: Gaming's Unfulfilled Promise
On paper, DirectStorage is brilliant. Your GPU pulls data straight from your NVMe SSD, bypassing the CPU bottleneck entirely. PC Games Hardware tested it—Intel Arc A770 pushed 16.8GB/s, RTX 4080 hit 15.3GB/s, AMD's 7900 XT managed 14.6GB/s. The tech works.
The catch? Basically nothing uses it. Ratchet & Clank, Forspoken, Forza Motorsport, Horizon Forbidden West. That's your list as of today.
PCWorld dug into why developers aren't jumping on board. It's a messy picture—significant dev time required for uncertain payoff, GPU decompression actually hurts performance on certain hardware, and studios haven't seen enough benefit to justify the effort.
Even games that implemented DirectStorage haven't nailed it. Ratchet & Clank actually ran worse on NVIDIA cards in some scenarios. Nixxes couldn't get GPU decompression working right in Horizon, so they just... skipped that part.
One more thing: DirectStorage runs on Windows 10 too (1909 and later). Windows 11's supposed to have better optimizations, but it's not an exclusive.
So we've got impressive technology that genuinely works—and almost nobody benefits from it because game support isn't there.
Windows 11 vs Windows 10 Gaming Benchmarks: The Confusing Truth
Ask ten people whether Windows 11 or 10 is faster for gaming. You'll get twelve different answers. The honest answer? It depends on more variables than most people want to deal with.
Neowin ran comprehensive tests in August across 14 CPUs:
- Cyberpunk 2077: Windows 11 ahead by 19%
- Far Cry 6: Windows 11 ahead by 22%
- Assassin's Creed Odyssey: Windows 11 significantly faster
- Hitman 3: Windows 10 ahead by 9%
- Monster Hunter Wilds: Windows 10 ahead by 33%
Meanwhile, Tom's Hardware tested back in 2021 and found basically nothing—sub-1% differences across 14 games.
Why Results Vary So Wildly
Installation method matters enormously. A clean Windows 11 install consistently outperforms an upgrade from Windows 10. If you upgraded in place, you're probably not seeing the OS at its best.
Memory Integrity (VBS/HVCI) is a hidden performance tax. This security feature costs 5-15% FPS in CPU-bound scenarios. Whether it's enabled depends on how Windows got onto your machine—some installations have it on by default, others don't. TechPowerUp measured up to 28% performance hit in Cyberpunk 2077 and Starfield.
Your CPU generation changes everything. Intel's hybrid architecture chips (12th-gen onward) genuinely benefit from Windows 11's smarter thread scheduling. Running older silicon? You're probably not seeing those gains.
Game engines themselves behave differently between the two operating systems. There's no universal rule.
The debates on Overclock.net capture this perfectly. One poster:
"There have been more than a dozen different overclockers reporting the same results... W10 remains better than W11 for gaming performance purposes."
Another:
"Clean install Windows 11 23H2 is 100% undoubtably the king... my Cinebench score jumped about 500 pts and my 3dMark Time Spy score went up almost 2,000 pts."
Neither one is lying. They're just describing different hardware in different configurations.
This inconsistency genuinely frustrates me. Upgrading your operating system shouldn't require cross-referencing your exact CPU, GPU, and motherboard to predict whether you'll gain or lose performance. You shouldn't need to disable security features just to hit your previous frame rates. Microsoft sold Windows 11 as "the best Windows for gaming ever"—but the reality is it depends on your specific setup and whether you did a clean install. That's not an upgrade. That's a coin flip.
Bloatware, Telemetry, and Copilot: Where Microsoft's Priorities Actually Lie
None of what I'm about to describe directly hurts your frame rates. But it reveals something about who Microsoft thinks Windows 11 is for—and it's not gamers.
The bloatware situation: A fresh Windows 11 install greets you with Candy Crush, ad-supported Solitaire, Microsoft Teams, Clipchamp, OneDrive notifications, and a pile of apps you never asked for. Digital Citizen documented the full list; Win11Debloat's GitHub has removal scripts. Microsoft gave enterprise IT a proper Group Policy option to block these apps in July 2025. Home users? Still need PowerShell or third-party tools.
The telemetry situation: Windows 11 collects hardware specs, app usage, error reports, and network data—that's the "Required" tier you can't disable. Optional data includes browsing history, typing patterns, and location. Multiple sources confirm it phones home even at minimum settings. The EU forced better privacy controls under the Digital Markets Act. Those stayed in Europe.
The Copilot situation: Microsoft scattered AI buttons across Notepad, File Explorer, Paint, Photos, the Start menu, and taskbar. Windows Central's Zac Bowden called it out: "Notepad doesn't need an AI button, for goodness sake." When a Microsoft exec floated the "agentic OS" vision in late 2024, the backlash was harsh enough that he disabled replies.
Here's the pattern: Enterprise customers get legitimate tools and controls. European users get regulatory-mandated privacy improvements. American home users get advertising IDs, pre-installed games, and AI buttons—with workarounds hidden behind PowerShell and Settings menus most people never find.
This matters for gamers because it shows where Microsoft's development energy goes. Not toward fixing the update QA process that broke NVIDIA gaming for five weeks. Not toward expanding DirectStorage adoption. Toward monetization features and AI integration that generate headlines.
Windows 11 Gaming Features That Actually Deliver
Auto HDR genuinely works. It retrofits HDR support into older SDR games automatically. If you've got an HDR display, it's noticeable and costs nothing in performance. Testing backs up Microsoft's claims here.
Thread scheduling improved for hybrid CPUs. Windows 11 routes workloads more intelligently across Intel's performance and efficiency cores. If you're on 12th-gen or newer, this matters.
Game Mode got meaningful updates. Microsoft's ROG Ally testing showed 9.3% lower RAM usage and up to 8.6% better frame rates in certain titles. Those improvements are rolling out to desktop Windows 11.
Credit where it's due—these are tangible wins.
What Would "Good" Actually Look Like?
Criticism without prescription is just venting. So what would Microsoft need to do to actually deserve the "best Windows for gaming" tagline?
A gaming-stable update ring. Let gamers opt into a slower update cadence—tested longer, deployed after the early adopters have caught the bugs. Xbox already does graduated rollouts. Apply that thinking to Windows gaming updates.
Public acknowledgment when gaming breaks. The KB5066835 silence was inexcusable. A known issues page updated within days, not weeks. A direct line to GPU vendors when something goes wrong. Basic transparency.
Memory Integrity defaults that make sense. If VBS/HVCI costs 15-28% performance in games, either optimize it or default it off for gaming-focused installs. Don't bury security-vs-performance tradeoffs where casual users never find them.
Developer incentives for DirectStorage. The tech works. Adoption doesn't. Microsoft has resources—certification programs, marketing muscle, technical support. Use them to make DirectStorage worth the dev time.
Respect the clean install. If someone formats their drive and installs Windows fresh, they've made a clear choice about their machine. Don't immediately clutter it with Candy Crush and Copilot prompts. Offer those during setup, make them opt-in, and move on.
None of this is technically impossible. Microsoft has the engineering talent and market position to do all of it. The question is whether gaming users matter enough to warrant the effort.
The Bottom Line: Should Gamers Upgrade to Windows 11 in 2025?
Windows 11 isn't categorically better or worse for gaming. It's a mixed bag that varies wildly by configuration.
The October update objectively broke NVIDIA gaming performance—documented across multiple outlets, affecting specific hardware combinations. DirectStorage works but sits unused by almost every game. The bloatware, telemetry, and AI integration don't cost frames, but they reveal where Microsoft's priorities lie.
What you'll experience depends on your hardware. Clean installs on modern chips often run great. In-place upgrades on older systems are a coin toss.
Windows 10's support ended October 14, 2025. Security updates now cost $30 annually. Future gaming tech will be Windows 11 exclusive. For most gamers, the question isn't whether to upgrade—it's how to minimize the downsides when you do.
My honest assessment: Windows 11 brings real improvements—Auto HDR, smarter CPU scheduling, Game Mode optimizations. But it also brings monthly updates that break things, bloatware you need technical knowledge to remove, telemetry you can't fully disable, and security features that trade frames for protection.
The inconsistency is what gets me. One person installs Windows 11 and everything's smooth. The next sees performance drops and broken features. Whether it's "better" depends on hardware combinations, installation methods, and update timing that shouldn't matter this much. Microsoft called this the best Windows for gaming ever. For some rigs running some games under some conditions? Maybe. For others? Not close. That's not an upgrade path. That's gambling.