PSA: If you're having performance issues in March 2019 check here first

[Drex83]

I've pasted this response to a number of posts today trying to be informative for people's benefit but I can only do this so many times and I know DE has a lot on their shoulders with this update without Microsoft causing headaches so I thought I'd make this post for the community's sake.

So! Big PSA, did you open this post because you're having big performance issues that cropped up in the last few days since this update? Maybe it is the game, but maybe it's not. Have you updated Windows this month? If so you may want to take a look at this: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-update-ruins-gaming-performance,38761.html

That's the whole of it, but the short of it is Microsoft screwed up big time this month, their update this month was supposed to bring in a new Specter/Meltdown vulnerability fix which is a good thing since it was a hardware security problem last year and MS had to release patches to patch around it that hurt performance, people were expecting performance gains this month as the new version of the fix for these problems was supposed to have a lot of kinks worked out. Unfortunately I don't even know how many people are seeing gains because MS screwed up.... something in this month's Windows update is broken, which is effecting gaming performance in general for many people. So if you're having problems it may not be the game, it may be your PC if it updated already. I think MS has since stopped this update from automatic rollout unless you manually check for updates now that they know this is happening, but I know it already got pushed to ME automatically so I'm not the only one. If it's hitting you hard enough to care though you should be able to uninstall it until MS has a fix.

Also worth noting, is I also heard Nvidia also put new specter/meltdown fixes into their video drivers recently. Considering it was a bit of a tech headache last year when people found out they'd be losing performance over the necessary fixes for this stuff, it wouldn't surprise me if this is also hurting people's speeds as well. But right now, I'm pointing the finger at Microsoft more personally. Hopefully MS will have a better fix to this out quickly, I think it's a bit embarrassing that this skipped around their safety nets as it were anyway since they have public betas of this stuff well in advance, I find it hard to believe this went unreported before the full rollout of this build.

Edited March 10, 2019 by Drex83

[Drex83]

Just wanted to add an update to this: Microsoft issued the fix to their performance issue today, so if you were having performance probs try making sure you update Windows again today first!