DF Retro is on the scene with a brand new video that runs benchmarks against PC's before and after the recent Sprectre & Meltdown CPU vulnerability patches. If your not familiar with the recent bugs effecting nearly every computer, I found some great PC World articles that explain the situation pretty well.

"A pair of nasty CPU flaws exposed this week have serious ramifications for home computer users. Meltdown and Spectre let attackers access protected information in your PC’s kernel memory, potentially revealing sensitive details like passwords, cryptographic keys, personal photos and email, or anything else you’ve used on your computer. These are serious flaws. Fortunately, CPU and operating system vendors pushed out patches fast, and you can protect your PC from Meltdown and Spectre to some degree."

Looks like Microsoft & Apple have released patches for computers and phones but you will need to apply firmware updates for your motherboard and CPU. With all of that said, it looks like that many games aren't negatively impacted by the security patches. It seems the biggest performance hits are to virtual machines or cloud computing but since none of that matters for games running on our computers that are single player much of gaming looks to be fine. The hit to cloud computing looks pretty incredible though the end run being that either virtualization needs to be optimized or people might need to run more hardware to cover current workloads.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245810/security/how-to-protect-your-pc-meltdown-spectre-cpu-flaws.html
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245606/security/intel-x86-cpu-kernel-bug-faq-how-it-affects-pc-mac.html