A new cumulative update for the latest version of Windows 10 is playing havoc with gaming performance on some users’ PCs, at least going by reports online.
The patch in question is KB4482887 for Windows 10 October 2018 Update, which was very recently unleashed to deliver a bunch of fixes, including enabling ‘Retpoline’ which should improve the performance of PCs by mitigating any sluggishness caused by the Spectre variant 2 fix.
However, rather ironically, the update seems to have had the reverse effect for some in certain games, delivering a big performance hit – although this may not have anything to do with the Retpoline fix (more on that later).
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Multiple threads have popped up on Reddit describing performance issues primarily with Destiny 2, but also with other games.
One commenter said that their mouse settings felt wrong, and they were getting ‘much less’ than 60 frames per second in Destiny 2 on a seriously powerful rig with twin SLI RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards. Uninstalling the KB4482887 update fixed the problem (which apparently affects both Nvidia and AMD GPUs alike).
There are multiple reports of serious Destiny 2 woes along these lines, and another Reddit thread observed “massive lag spikes in older games, like CoD4 and CoD MW2” and hugely laggy mouse performance. Again, these issues went away after uninstalling the update (and came back if it was reinstalled).
Feed it back
Chipping in on the former Reddit thread, a Microsoft employee said: “This is likely not related to Retpoline (Spectre mitigation) since it's not enabled for retail users yet (as of 3/4/2019).” The Microsoft staffer then urged anyone with gaming-related performance issues to submit feedback (providing a link which seems to be broken, but you can use the feedback hub).
Note that the official response isn’t certain about it being unrelated to the Retpoline fix, but we do know that the latter is being deployed gradually as a phased rollout, so may not actually be live on a lot of PCs yet.
However, perhaps those experiencing issues could be the “certain devices” for which Microsoft noted the Retpoline fix has gone live in these initial stages of deployment. Still, the Microsoft staff member clearly believes that any gaming performance hit probably isn’t related.
At any rate, the takeaway for now is to dump KB4482887 (or avoid installation in the first place) if you’re experiencing sluggishness with Destiny 2 or any other games on Windows 10 October 2018 Update.
Hopefully we’ll hear more about the exact root cause, and hopefully a resolution to the aforementioned issues, before too long.
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Via Windows Latest
