Microsoft Update Breaks Assassin’s Creed Shadows — What Went Wrong
About seven weeks ago, the author upgraded to a new PC and began re-installing favorite games to test system performance. Among them was Assassin’s Creed Shadows — a next-gen entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. But something felt off. Despite using a modern Nvidia graphics card, the game under-performed: frame rates didn’t improve over the author’s old PC, and he had to lower graphics settings to get acceptable performance.
After hours of tinkering and troubleshooting, suspicion fell on a recent mandatory update to Windows 11 — specifically update KB5066835. Released by Microsoft in mid-October, the patch appears to have altered how Windows interacts with video hardware. For Assassin’s Creed Shadows, that change allegedly caused frame-rate drops of up to 100 frames per second, dramatically degrading performance on otherwise capable hardware.
As of now, only users with Nvidia hardware seem to have access to a partial work-around; there’s no universal official fix. The author recommends patience — hopefully, either Microsoft or the game developers at Ubisoft will issue a patch to resolve compatibility issues between KB5066835 and Shadows’ graphics engine.
If you like, I can also expand this into a slightly longer article (≈ 800–900 words) — giving background on Shadows, the Windows update, common user reports, and official responses (if any).
Do you want me to build that for you now
