System:

i2700k stock clock

16gb RAM

Nvidia 970gtx

Raid0 / Striped SSD drive for simulator 

Yesterday, after multiple attempts by MS to push my Win10 install from Anniversary to Creators, they finally succeeded, being the crafty software engineers they are.

Being quite security conscious these days these same engineers quickly patched my machine for the HW bug Spectre/Meltdown (or visa-versa).  This patch, especially on older HW like mine predicts noticeable impacts especially around things like file I/O and other predictive heavy ops.

Immediately after Win10 informed me I had been patched I ran my setup of P3d V4 on my HW described above. First perception is frame rate reductions, but that does not seem consistently reproducible. What is reproducible to me at least is the sense that something just kicked the ‘guts’ out of my sim. I always believed that P3d v4 biggest 64bit gain was low-end torque for lack of a batter word. IOW frames drop to high teens, but movement is still perceived as fluid. Now for me, not so much.

So again, is it me, or...?

Benchmarking my rig before and after the Meltdown patch, the comparative performance using AIDA64 was less than 2% with some things faster after Meltdown. 

All in all, no performance change that exceeded the benchmark margin of error.

Our business is managing other folks IT. Based on our research and what we saw in a 1500+ computer fleet was the Meltdown patch did not make a statistically significant reduction in performance. 

Computers using M4 SSD's or other I/O peripherals connected directly to the PCI bus would likely show the greatest performance change. 

If I were you, I would be looking at my antivirus version possibly not being compatible with Creator's Edition or similar adverse program interaction. 

And, of course, make sure you have all the drivers for all your hardware at compatible versions.

Hope this helps.