A/V Gaming Question

I read somewhere that turning off virus scanning when reading from disk would increase gaming performance. Is this true? If so, what aspects would it increase (latency, fps, ect.)? Thanks.

 

This is not easy to answer. Generally what should be faster is disk access times (loading times) of games. Depending on how deeply your AV digs into your system you might experience FPS changes, however extremely minor ones (1-2FPS at a maximum).

Latency should only be affected by the firewall, but also not to any really noticeable effect under normal circumstances (unless you use some real bad ass fw which literally takes apart your traffic to the smallest components), and of course depending on the game implementation.

For disk access times, it is mostly games that use thousands of files directly on your filesystem that might see a gain with disabled on access scanners. However it is fairly common for games to use large package files (basically archives) to store their in-game content. In these cases on-access scanning should not really interfere with your game experience either.


What game modes are for (some AVs have that), is mostly to disable visible updates or notifications that might kick you out of fullscreen in your game and back to the desktop, which is something some games do not really like.

 

I guess the answer would be yes and no. Apart from what FRug described above, having the on-access scanner active does consume more memory. So if you're low on RAM requirements for the game you want to play, disabling the AV might provide a tangible performance increase.

When I had an older computer with only 256MB RAM and McAfee VirusScan 7.0, running Unreal 2 with McAfee enabled would cause long pauses between areas in the game while playing. Disabling McAfee would cure all that, and other AVs worked much better than McAfee did for that regard, though disabling them would still give a bit of a performance boost.

With newer computers and more efficient real-time scanners, it seems RAM usage is no longer a significant issue, but yet it is something to be kept in mind. So if your game needs lots of RAM and your PC does not exceed the minimum RAM requirements, you might want to disable your on-access scanner.

 

i would reccomend posting your pc specs and what games you intend to play.

 

There's no point in disabling antivirus for gaming. Framerates are not affected, maybe level load time will take few seconds longer, nothing else.

 

Hi,

My son uses Vista64, he has now only router as FW, HauteSecure as sandbox and Avast 4.8 Nicething about teh router is that it can be set to give priority over gaming.

Standard shield only checks when writing, he uses other shiels for P2P, webmail, chat, web (Http). Leaving Webshield on, only makes a difference for 1 FPS. Disabling read improves load times.

His experience is (what he tells me) is in line with other answers (software FW is the major cause). Best FW on Vista was Vista's onw internal FW (you can add outbound control with VistaFireWallCOntrol).

Since it is a gaming box, with only his homework of school, I thought it to be okay to turn off software FW.

Regards

 

I have a 680i, Q6600 3gHZ, 2GB ram, 8800gtx oc. So if it only could affect fps, then leaving it on should be fine.

 

@Makav3l1
Kaspersky and avira has the option to exclude a particular process from real time monitoring and thus all the files accessed by that process in not scanned . This really worked for me . A few days back when i was trying kaspersky it used to always interfere with my fifa08 and frame rate was affected . As i excluded the fifa08 process from kaspersky "FILE AV" ; everything went smooth . Well that was just my experience . Good luck and happy gaming

 

I experienced some slowdown using NIS even with AutoProtect off. Trend was worse because I had turned it's protection off and right in the middle of a firefight in COD4 all of the sudden I was back on my desktop with Trend telling me it had turned protection back on. Very frustrating.

McAfee has a "gaming mode" like what FRug described. During gameplay (or any full screen app like watching DVDs) it will not bother you with popups. It was light so I did not had to turn off protection. WLOC is light for gaming too though it does not suppress popups, it pops them up "under" the game until you go back to the desktop. When I hear a "ding" during gameplay I know this had happened.

 

I have another question, as this is my gaming comp and I want the lowest ping/latency possible. I had been using cfp w/D+, I ditched it and am now using windows firewall. Is there any other fw that is better for gaming than windows firewall?

 

Ghostwall.

 

Lucas on XP I bet you are right but on Vista it might well be Vista's own

 

Ghostwall doesn't even work on Vista

 

From my experience AV's mainly have an impact on loading times.
But even this impact can vary tremendously from one game to another.
So best thing is to take a look at the game logs or consult a watch.

In UT3 logs you can find this "Initial startup:" time, which means how long does it last from starting the game to load the main screen.
With my rig (E6750, 2GB RAM, 8800GTS 640MB, XP) and different AVs:
avast! Home 4.8: 14.68s; NOD32 2.7: 16.83s; Avira Premium 8: 18.25s; KIS 7: 53.33s
KIS is the loser on my system.

But a different result if you look at Crysis and the Game_LevelLoadTime (sec):
Without AV: 45s; Avira 7: 45s; BIS2008 (Game Mode): 45s; ESS 3: 45s; KIS 7: 46s; NOD32 2.7: 46s.
Which AV you use doesn't make any significant difference here.

The same thing with the FPS in Crysis (Benchmark_CPU, Benchmark_GPU), no AV from above had an noticeable effect on FPS.
The result was always Benchmark_CPU: 39.xx, Benchmark_GPU: 45.xx, only xx were different, therefore it's negligible.

And the latency has nothing to do with the AV, latency can be affected by your firewall.
But firewalls will likelier affect your bandwidth or filesharing with many connections than have an great impact on latency in games.

Cheers

 

Adding the game's data archive to the AV's exclusion list can be a compromise of having the AV always on minus the 1 to 2 seconds added during game/map load time. Some online games do have the option for ads which can be a channel for malware to use although a firewall rule can block that certain port/ip used for the game's ads.