AV & Gaming impact

[clocks]

The new Norton Gaming Edition comes out on top.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2336629,00.asp

[xxJackxx]

Yep, the Norton is so fast it beats no AV at all in the PCMark Vantage scores. ::)

All of the scores are within 3% tops. None of them would sell me anything based on these tests. Too close to call, except for maybe AVG (free), which was consistently lowest, but again by 3%. Synthetic scores and FPS measurements do not tell you how smooth these are. I've seen smooth gameplay at 50 FPS and stutter at 100 FPS. An interesting read, but you would definitely want to do your own testing as these results all fall within the margin of error anyway.

[maniac2003]

I'm a subscriber to a German magazine (PC Games Hardware). This month they also held a test.
The winner was G-Data Antivirus 2009.

They did a number of tests:
1. Copying 10.000 files
Fastest was Avira Antivir Personal
2. Loading a savegame (Far Cry 2 DX10 "Ranch Small")
Fastest overall was Clamwin Free Antivirus
3. Change in Boottime
Least change was with Clamwin Free Antivirus (+5 seconds)
4. Gaming impact
Best was G-Data with no difference between no AV and when G-data was installed, Norton AV 2009 came in second place.

Detection rates were also taken into account when determing a winner.

[lodore]

Hello,
not many av's were tested.
what about mcafee,eset etc.

[subset]

-{ Quote: "
4. Gaming impact
Best was G-Data with no difference between no AV and when G-data was installed, ..." }-
G Data won the PCGH test three times during the last four years, these tests are a load of sponsored cr**.
G Data - zero performance impact. :wacko:
Who on earth believes that?

Cheers

[TrojanHunter]

Tiny difference, hardly a landslide win for Norton. If someone is that concerned about AV usage on game performance, then simply switch it off during play, but none of these AV programs make that much difference on system resources to warrant exiting them.

I always have concern that review sites like magazines and websites, may not always be accurate.With Magazines I read, to many times they'll test a selection of applications, but almost always try and sell just one of them as their golden choice. They either favour something or stand to receive financial gain by pushing something.

[Gren]

-{ Quote: "Tiny difference, hardly a landslide win for Norton. If someone is that concerned about AV usage on game performance, then simply switch it off during play, but none of these AV programs make that much difference on system resources to warrant exiting them." }-

Agree that the differences are so small as to not make it worthwhile exiting but am wondering whether the differences would be any larger on a less powerful system. That spec is higher than many people would have and the overheads of any security software would be smaller as a percentage on such a powerful setup. Would have loved to see the same tests on a twin core with 2GB ram and a more mainstream gfx card.

[clocks]

-{ Quote: "Would have loved to see the same tests on a twin core with 2GB ram and a more mainstream gfx card." }-

I agree.

[Inspector Clouseau]

If you know how an AV works and you know the content of the game (the files and filetypes what they are using, such as resource-data-files etc) you can configure almost EVERY AV lightning fast without loosing protection. The problem with games is the so called "scan all files no matter of mimetype" configuration. That slows down because the On-Access Modul tries then to scan files ( game data files ) that usually don't need to be scanned. This results in a delayed loading of the game data files and the game might loose FPS rates or gets interrupted during game play. The easiest way to solve this problem is to exclude specific file types IN THE GAME INSTALLATION FOLDER itself. In this way you don't loose detection for other files in other directories in case you're going to exclude picture files such as JPG as well. However, never ever exclude a full folder. That results in serious security risks for example if the game executable is infected with an file infector virus. So don't exclude *.EXE files for that. But most of the game files you can exclude and that will dramatically speed up. It's also a good idea to set TEMPORARY auto-updaters from the system off. Otherwise you run into trouble when you play wed and windows wants to apply the patches from tue (happens always wed). Don't forget to turn that on again later after finishing playing!

[ThunderZ]

A very good point about auto-updates Inspector Clouseau. Speaking for my current AV, it has the ability to check for full screen applications, games, prior to checking for, d\l`ing and installing updates. I would think others include this as well.

[Sully]

I play games occassionaly, cod4 type FPS games. I have been using Avira now for a few years. I leave it on all the time, scanning both on reads and writes. I have not noticed any difference with it on or off. A newer machine I doubt will be phased by any decent AV.

Sul.

[Quitch]

What this test shows is that AV is pretty much irrelevant to framerate, which is hardly surprising since during gameplay almost everything the game needs has been loaded into memory. A more interesting test would be level load time.