Last month, Microsoft published an advisory on how to boost Windows 11 performance. In it, the company recommended turning off certain security features to improve gaming performance. So it was an option, a trade-off for those players who were willing to compromise on a more secure device in lieu of raw power.

While Microsoft didn’t detail the kind of push users might expect from the change, early reports from last year claimed that memory integrity or virtualization-based security (VBS) were causing nearly 30% loss on certain devices. scenarios, even on systems that were officially Windows 11 ready. These features are generally considered to consume CPU cycles and disk usage, among other things, so disabling them improves performance.

And with memory integrity disabled, Intel’s Arc discrete GPUs are seeing a decent performance boost. According to Twitter user Löschzwerg, the Arc A380 graphics card earned between two and three thousand points in 3DMark03, which is a DirectX 9 benchmark. To put the score in context, the card originally scored around 58,000 points, which which represents a 5.2% increase in performance.

Meanwhile, using DXVK, a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9/10/11, performance increased three times in total, as you can see in the images below.

This is because Intel does not run DX9 natively on Arc and uses the D3D9On12 mapping layer. However, DXVK is much more efficient at extracting performance and seems to be a great help for the driver overhead that Intel discrete cards currently have. After all, Arc is new and making efficient software takes time.

Since the Arc A380, which is an entry-level card, was tested here, it’s possible to some degree that higher-end SKUs like the Arc A750 or A770 would end up getting a bigger boost than the 5.2% listed here with the card disabled. Windows features. However, we must remember that synthetic 3D benchmarks like 3DMark are already quite light on CPU usage and there may be less headroom left for more gains.

Source and images: Löschzwerg (Twitter)