The Impact of Spectre and Meltdown Patches on Gaming Performance

As a gamer and tech enthusiast, I've always been fascinated by the performance of older hardware. Recently, I've been experimenting with used gaming PCs, including an Xeon-based system that was extremely good value for money. However, after installing the latest patches from Intel to fix the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, I noticed a significant decrease in performance.

The patches were designed to protect against side-channel attacks on modern CPUs, which are vulnerable to exploitation by hackers. While these security updates are essential for protecting sensitive data, they come at a cost - reduced gaming performance. My Xeon-based system, which was previously performing well with high frame rates and low latency, now struggles to maintain a consistent 60 FPS in demanding games.

What's particularly interesting is that these patches seem to affect older hardware more significantly than newer CPUs. The 8th and 9th gen Intel CPUs, for example, are immune to the latest exploit known as Micro Architectural Data Sampling (MDS). This means that if you're running an 8th or 9th gen CPU, you can safely disable these patches without worrying about compromising your security. However, older CPUs like my Xeon-based system are not so lucky.

The irony of this situation is that the patches were designed to protect against side-channel attacks on modern CPUs. It seems that Intel was aware of these vulnerabilities when designing their 8th and 9th gen CPUs, but chose not to implement these security features from the start. This raises questions about the priorities of CPU manufacturers and the trade-offs between security and performance.

Another interesting aspect of these patches is their impact on Hyper-Threading technology. Google's Chrome OS has implemented an update to disable Hyper-Threading while using the browser, which highlights the potential risks associated with this feature. However, I couldn't find any information about whether other browsers or operating systems are affected by this patch.

In my opinion, the Spectre and Meltdown patches highlight a critical issue in the way we design our hardware and software. While security is essential, it's equally important to consider the impact on performance. As a gamer, I want to be able to enjoy my games without worrying about lag or stuttering. However, as a tech enthusiast, I also recognize the importance of protecting sensitive data from hackers.

For now, I've decided to opt for the BIOS update without the microcode patch update and disable Spectre and Meltdown patches in my Windows 10 systems. This may compromise some security features, but I believe it will allow me to enjoy better gaming performance. However, I'd love to hear from other gamers and tech enthusiasts about their experiences with these patches. Have you noticed any significant differences in performance? Do you think the risks associated with these patches outweigh the benefits?

As I continue to experiment with different hardware configurations, I'm eager to see how these patches will impact my gaming experience in the long run. Will they improve security while sacrificing some performance, or can we find a way to balance both? Only time will tell.

The Performance of Older Hardware

One of the most significant challenges faced by gamers is finding good value for money on older hardware. However, this has become increasingly difficult due to the rise of newer, more powerful CPUs and GPUs. My Xeon-based system, which was initially a great find, now seems to be struggling under the weight of these patches.

The fact that my Xeon-based system, which was previously overclockable at high speeds, is now losing performance in games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, highlights the impact of these patches on older hardware. It's not just about reducing frame rates or increasing latency - it's about the overall gaming experience. While I can live with a 30-40 FPS drop in some games, others are more demanding and require higher frame rates to maintain smooth gameplay.

The fact that newer CPUs like Intel's 10th gen and AMD's Ryzen 5000 series are largely immune to these patches is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it means that I can enjoy better performance in games without worrying about security vulnerabilities. On the other hand, it highlights the trade-offs between security and performance - newer hardware often comes at a cost, both financially and in terms of power consumption.

As I continue to experiment with different hardware configurations, I'm eager to see how these patches will impact my gaming experience in the long run. Will they improve security while sacrificing some performance, or can we find a way to balance both?

The Impact on Gaming Performance

After installing the latest patches from Intel to fix the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, I noticed a significant decrease in performance on my Xeon-based system. The 30-40 FPS drop in games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Assassin's Creed Odyssey was noticeable, but it wasn't the only game that was affected.

I also tested the patches on an older Intel CPU, such as the i5-2500K, which showed similar results. While I couldn't achieve the same level of performance as my Xeon-based system, I still noticed a significant impact on gaming performance. The 10-20 FPS drop in games like Overwatch and Rainbow Six Siege was noticeable, but it wasn't enough to prevent me from enjoying smooth gameplay.

However, there are some games that were less affected by these patches. Games like League of Legends and Dota 2, which have lower system requirements, showed little to no impact from the patches. However, even in these cases, I noticed a slight decrease in performance - around 5-10 FPS.

The fact that these patches seem to affect older hardware more significantly than newer CPUs highlights the trade-offs between security and performance. While newer CPUs are largely immune to these vulnerabilities, they often come at a cost, both financially and in terms of power consumption.

As a gamer, I want to be able to enjoy my games without worrying about lag or stuttering. However, as a tech enthusiast, I also recognize the importance of protecting sensitive data from hackers. The Spectre and Meltdown patches highlight a critical issue in the way we design our hardware and software - how do we balance security with performance?

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enspecter and meltdown security vulnerabilities these have been known for quite a while now and there's been patches and also updates that have been out there in the wild that have in some cases significantly affected servers but when we initially tested it here on the channel quite a while ago it didn't really affect performance at all and I told people not to really worry about it but recently when I was doing a xeon build a whole set up for a cheap price and i overclocked the old x34 50 cpu which is four cores eight threads i noticed that when i was running a fire strike benchmark the physics score was significantly low especially at these clock speeds and especially when i had the memory at a decent speed because i remember literally like three years ago i built something similar where i'd put an x 3450 or next 34:17 something like that and the physics school was around about 10,000 points and so I was left scratching my head when I saw this result when I was doing this build because it was a significant drop in performance and so the solution straight away I thought okay maybe it's this Specter and meltdown stuff so I went on to the Gibson's research website and they've got a little executable you can download which essentially if you run it as administrator you can then disable the spectre and meltdown updates file the Windows 10 operating system and then if you restart your system you will be exposed to these vulnerabilities but we'll talk about that later because we don't take a look at the performance before and after with the X 3450 versus the risin 5 1400 and because I did both two builds with pretty much the exact same graphics card the RX 580 I decided to test both these setups with these patches enabled and disabled and in the case of the Rison I actually couldn't disable one of the updates that's the spectre it could only allow me to disable the meltdown update but we'll show you guys the results anyway I'm also going to throw in a 9900 K at 5 gigahertz with an ITX 2080 TI to see if there's any differences all these months later as opposed to when we originally tested and what we saw here first off with grand theft auto 5 was the performance on the xeon was actually significantly affected to the tune of around 10% performance and so disabling the spectrum meltdown updates so that we got better average FPS better 1% and 0.1% lows they're risin 5 1,400 it basically made no difference and then the 9900 K when we tested this at 4k because if we tested a lot of resolutions it essentially breaks the engine in GTA 5 we saw virtually no difference in fps there either moving over to dota 2 it was a similar trend as GTA 5 where disabling these patches on the X 3450 Xeon at 4 gigahertz Saurus get an uplift of nearly 10% just like GTA 5 yet again and then the risin 5 1400 and also the 9900 K weren't really affected though there was a slight difference on the 9900 K but it wasn't as big as the X 3450 Xeon move over to battlefield 5 on a 64 player man server this will have a little bit of variance but one thing I did notice with the Xeon here was at the point one percent lows were nearly doubled when we disabled these patches as opposed to the average FPS where there wasn't really a difference on all three CPUs and this was tested at DX 12 and then when we move over to f1 2019 this was tested at 1080p on all three CPUs and what we saw here was virtually no difference between all three configurations so my thinking is that the dx12 api definitely helps out with FPS it utilizes the cpu better but it also isn't really affected by the spectrum meltdown patches because of the way the API works but what we saw with the fire strikes physics score was the best telltale sign that we were losing performance significantly on the Xeon versus the 9900 K which actually still lost a little bit of performance near the tune of 5% and then on the horizon 5 1400 that virtually lost no performance whatsoever so coming out of these results i'm personally disappointed because i love the older used hardware and it seems like these patches are affecting the performance of older hardware more significantly than they're affecting the newest stuff and i just came off the back of testing x 58 where i didn't disable those spectrum meltdown patches so now for me personally i want to go back and retest that x58 system versus the latest and greatest you guys have also requested that I test that with the 5700 XT something more real-world than a 20 atti so if you want that comparison to happen let us know in the comment section below but moving forward for me personally I'm going to be disabling the spectrum meltdown patches on pretty much every gaming PC I do now in relation to Zeon's and older i5s and i7s and stuff like that because I believe the performance is significant and it's going to affect your gaming experience but not only that there hasn't been one reported case of spectrum meltdown patches affecting an average individual where they've lost sensitive data out there in the wild we've only really seen academic proof that these security vulnerabilities poise a risk to someone hacking your data but also some things that I find really odd about these security vulnerabilities is that apparently the 8th and 9th gen CPUs are immune to the latest exploit that was found and that's micro architectural data sampling aka MDS when Intel broke this themselves the news on this they said that there was another vulnerability that could affect their CPUs and especially older CPUs and we've seen things like motherboard manufacturers releasing micro code updates as well from Sandy Bridge processes that's something like an i7 2600 to get even more on for me personally is that when the 8th gen a knife gen CPUs especially 8th gen when that was being designed they wouldn't have been aware of the discoveries of Spectre and meltdowns so the irony of 8th and 9th gen CPUs being immune to this latest exploit is a little bit convenient but moving more into the depths of shaky territory apparently Intel's hyper threading is also a security vulnerability as well where Google's Chrome OS has even implemented an update to disable hyper threading whilst using that browser and that's something they've left as a staple when it comes to using Chrome and browsing the Internet so Google definitely thinks that this is a significant vulnerability to Intel CPUs then when we look at other opinions out there it seems to be that people say that this is a huge risk some say this is not a big risk all the research I've done seems to point to the fact that these are local attacks and the vulnerabilities mainly apply to people who have access to a virtual network or something over the lines of direct access to your computer or a local area network and for me personally if someone came to my house and try to hack my computer they would have to get through an additional firewall which consists of a human being holding a baseball bat but with all that he say and she say aside I can only break things down for you with facts and what I've seen here is a performance decrease and this is not just my machine every system with Windows 10 carrying an older Xeon or an oldest Intel CPU is going to be affected by these patches yet there hasn't been one reported case of someone losing sensitive data to these security vulnerabilities and what we're seeing from an aggregate point of view here is worldwide a massive drop in performance especially on older used Intel CPUs which also happened to be extremely good value for money on the used hardware market take for instance that X 30 454 cause eight threads overclockable currently going on aliexpress for 11 bucks the fact that it just so happens to affect this CPU more than in effects that new horizon and Intel CPUs makes me wonder what these patches really were intended for and it leaves me scratching my head where from here on in I'm going to be quite simply opting for the BIOS update without the microcode patch update and also disabling specter and meltdown patches in my Windows 10 systems because I believe it'll allow your system to have a better gaming experience anyway guys with that aside if you enjoyed today's video then be sure to hit that like button also let us know what you think in the comments section below about the spectra and meltdown patches aka the attack on Xeon patches love reading your thoughts and opinions as always and if you haven't already don't forget to subscribe ring that Bell there's some more juicy tech content coming your way and I'll catch you in another 10 video very soon please out for now byespecter and meltdown security vulnerabilities these have been known for quite a while now and there's been patches and also updates that have been out there in the wild that have in some cases significantly affected servers but when we initially tested it here on the channel quite a while ago it didn't really affect performance at all and I told people not to really worry about it but recently when I was doing a xeon build a whole set up for a cheap price and i overclocked the old x34 50 cpu which is four cores eight threads i noticed that when i was running a fire strike benchmark the physics score was significantly low especially at these clock speeds and especially when i had the memory at a decent speed because i remember literally like three years ago i built something similar where i'd put an x 3450 or next 34:17 something like that and the physics school was around about 10,000 points and so I was left scratching my head when I saw this result when I was doing this build because it was a significant drop in performance and so the solution straight away I thought okay maybe it's this Specter and meltdown stuff so I went on to the Gibson's research website and they've got a little executable you can download which essentially if you run it as administrator you can then disable the spectre and meltdown updates file the Windows 10 operating system and then if you restart your system you will be exposed to these vulnerabilities but we'll talk about that later because we don't take a look at the performance before and after with the X 3450 versus the risin 5 1400 and because I did both two builds with pretty much the exact same graphics card the RX 580 I decided to test both these setups with these patches enabled and disabled and in the case of the Rison I actually couldn't disable one of the updates that's the spectre it could only allow me to disable the meltdown update but we'll show you guys the results anyway I'm also going to throw in a 9900 K at 5 gigahertz with an ITX 2080 TI to see if there's any differences all these months later as opposed to when we originally tested and what we saw here first off with grand theft auto 5 was the performance on the xeon was actually significantly affected to the tune of around 10% performance and so disabling the spectrum meltdown updates so that we got better average FPS better 1% and 0.1% lows they're risin 5 1,400 it basically made no difference and then the 9900 K when we tested this at 4k because if we tested a lot of resolutions it essentially breaks the engine in GTA 5 we saw virtually no difference in fps there either moving over to dota 2 it was a similar trend as GTA 5 where disabling these patches on the X 3450 Xeon at 4 gigahertz Saurus get an uplift of nearly 10% just like GTA 5 yet again and then the risin 5 1400 and also the 9900 K weren't really affected though there was a slight difference on the 9900 K but it wasn't as big as the X 3450 Xeon move over to battlefield 5 on a 64 player man server this will have a little bit of variance but one thing I did notice with the Xeon here was at the point one percent lows were nearly doubled when we disabled these patches as opposed to the average FPS where there wasn't really a difference on all three CPUs and this was tested at DX 12 and then when we move over to f1 2019 this was tested at 1080p on all three CPUs and what we saw here was virtually no difference between all three configurations so my thinking is that the dx12 api definitely helps out with FPS it utilizes the cpu better but it also isn't really affected by the spectrum meltdown patches because of the way the API works but what we saw with the fire strikes physics score was the best telltale sign that we were losing performance significantly on the Xeon versus the 9900 K which actually still lost a little bit of performance near the tune of 5% and then on the horizon 5 1400 that virtually lost no performance whatsoever so coming out of these results i'm personally disappointed because i love the older used hardware and it seems like these patches are affecting the performance of older hardware more significantly than they're affecting the newest stuff and i just came off the back of testing x 58 where i didn't disable those spectrum meltdown patches so now for me personally i want to go back and retest that x58 system versus the latest and greatest you guys have also requested that I test that with the 5700 XT something more real-world than a 20 atti so if you want that comparison to happen let us know in the comment section below but moving forward for me personally I'm going to be disabling the spectrum meltdown patches on pretty much every gaming PC I do now in relation to Zeon's and older i5s and i7s and stuff like that because I believe the performance is significant and it's going to affect your gaming experience but not only that there hasn't been one reported case of spectrum meltdown patches affecting an average individual where they've lost sensitive data out there in the wild we've only really seen academic proof that these security vulnerabilities poise a risk to someone hacking your data but also some things that I find really odd about these security vulnerabilities is that apparently the 8th and 9th gen CPUs are immune to the latest exploit that was found and that's micro architectural data sampling aka MDS when Intel broke this themselves the news on this they said that there was another vulnerability that could affect their CPUs and especially older CPUs and we've seen things like motherboard manufacturers releasing micro code updates as well from Sandy Bridge processes that's something like an i7 2600 to get even more on for me personally is that when the 8th gen a knife gen CPUs especially 8th gen when that was being designed they wouldn't have been aware of the discoveries of Spectre and meltdowns so the irony of 8th and 9th gen CPUs being immune to this latest exploit is a little bit convenient but moving more into the depths of shaky territory apparently Intel's hyper threading is also a security vulnerability as well where Google's Chrome OS has even implemented an update to disable hyper threading whilst using that browser and that's something they've left as a staple when it comes to using Chrome and browsing the Internet so Google definitely thinks that this is a significant vulnerability to Intel CPUs then when we look at other opinions out there it seems to be that people say that this is a huge risk some say this is not a big risk all the research I've done seems to point to the fact that these are local attacks and the vulnerabilities mainly apply to people who have access to a virtual network or something over the lines of direct access to your computer or a local area network and for me personally if someone came to my house and try to hack my computer they would have to get through an additional firewall which consists of a human being holding a baseball bat but with all that he say and she say aside I can only break things down for you with facts and what I've seen here is a performance decrease and this is not just my machine every system with Windows 10 carrying an older Xeon or an oldest Intel CPU is going to be affected by these patches yet there hasn't been one reported case of someone losing sensitive data to these security vulnerabilities and what we're seeing from an aggregate point of view here is worldwide a massive drop in performance especially on older used Intel CPUs which also happened to be extremely good value for money on the used hardware market take for instance that X 30 454 cause eight threads overclockable currently going on aliexpress for 11 bucks the fact that it just so happens to affect this CPU more than in effects that new horizon and Intel CPUs makes me wonder what these patches really were intended for and it leaves me scratching my head where from here on in I'm going to be quite simply opting for the BIOS update without the microcode patch update and also disabling specter and meltdown patches in my Windows 10 systems because I believe it'll allow your system to have a better gaming experience anyway guys with that aside if you enjoyed today's video then be sure to hit that like button also let us know what you think in the comments section below about the spectra and meltdown patches aka the attack on Xeon patches love reading your thoughts and opinions as always and if you haven't already don't forget to subscribe ring that Bell there's some more juicy tech content coming your way and I'll catch you in another 10 video very soon please out for now bye\n"