NVIDIA Gaming Performance Minimally Impacted By KPTI Patches

Or with a CPU-bound Xonotic run, the performance also wasn't hit.

Civilization VI allows for capturing the per-frame timing information in our benchmark runs. Here we see the frame times really didn't move at all either with the KPTI enablement.

The OpenArena frame-time also really wasn't affected by Kernel Page Table Isolation on the two tested NVIDIA GPUs using Ubuntu with the Linux 4.14.11 kernel.

As said already, the game load times were not affected either by this new kernel security feature. So long story short, the NVIDIA gaming performance -- similar to the already published Radeon results -- are minimally impacted by KPTI if at all. Reports of the NVIDIA driver being more adversely impacted by KPTI than Radeon appear to be unfounded.

In all of my KPTI / "CPU bug" testing so far this week, the most noticeable but still not anything close to being like a universal "5~30% slowdown" (what some other outlets have been erroneously reporting) is just with select high I/O workloads and VM performance suffering in some situations.