Do Antivirus Suites Impact Your PC's Performance?

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Most of us are now fairly confident that our antivirus scanners are doing their main job of protecting our systems from malicious pests. But what are those scanners doing to system performance behind the scenes? Are some scanners better than others?
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http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/antivirus-performance-benchmark,3045.html


Looks like an interesting article - gonna read it tomorrow after I get a bit of sleep.

 

Umm, according to their tests, their machine booted slowest with no antivirus? Not buying that at all.

They also failed to include quite a few popular AVs; Avast!, Avira, ESET, Panda to name a few.

I have a question after reading this; do antiviruses have an impact on framerates in video games? I want to get the most out of my games, so would I see a noticeable boost in framerate by disabling my antivirus when gaming? In their test they lost 11fps with an antivirus; that's pretty significant.

 

That's just an article about the latest AV-Comparatives performance test, discussed here:

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=305391&highlight=av-comparatives

 

no it is not. only at the begin the used some of our graphs, but then they did their own performance testing (with IMO very strange results).

 

Wow installing vipre speeds up ur pc so much

 

I think 'Pirtnac' asked some good questions about the validity of the tests:

"I'd have to ask what power saving state the CPU was placed in due to antivirus running. If an AV program is keeping a processor active and quickly "parks" itself when a test is run, results may differ based upon the tiny amount of time to ramp up the CPU on the clean install with nothing eating time. Or search indexer was running during testing on the "clean" install, and did it's thing before disk images were made for the rest of the tests.

Theory two is the windows security center. I didn't see any notes relating to it during test setup, MS's default settings could be bogging down the system. I know Security Center's constant checking for AV software slowed down my system, as would it's checking the status of UAC while disabled.

Regarding boot times I've seen AV software force it's own service to be the only one to load on startup, with every other service set to delayed boot. Otherwise malware could load first and disable the AV. Your "boot" time with AV installed may indeed be the time it takes the user interface to load, but services starting up afterwards will require a user to wait longer for a usable machine."

 

Check out these tests (a little bit outdated, but very complete)
http://www.raymond.cc/antivirus/

Thanks to Mr. PC for pointing

 

Oddest results ever. Either I am misreading them, or they make no sense.

 

Your not misreading them.

 

No my system was so much faster with a suite or stand alone that I removed them to slow things down. They make No sense to me either.

 

You are welcome!

 

I think the key point goes back to their conclusion stating they are testing these AV's on pretty high end machines. The impact will vary by machine, and also vary but what else you have running in real time and in startup. A multicore cpu, 2gb or more ram, a fast hard drive (ssi or raptor), and a lean system with only the AV on at startup pretty much guarantee's a fast system these days. On a modern machine with only the AV running on startup....you shouldn't notice an AV unless you are doing some maaaajor power computing and running multiple demanding applications at the same time.

As far as the question about AV's slowing frame rates in pc gaming, I played pc games from 2003-2006 and the consensus then was that AV's don't use a ton of CPU or ram, the main hit was to the hard drive which is also extensively used during gaming. This caused longer loading times, and often more "skippy" or uneven gameplay even though frame rate was the basically the same w/o an AV. This appears to be one reason why many game manufacturers in the game manuals would suggest disabling an AV during install and game play, which caused some controversy. Current hard drives are much better, SSI, 32mb or 64mb cache hard drives, and 10k raptors are more common now.

My advice is if your noticing a hit then its easy to temporarily disable most AV's or you have to go with an AV free setup, or just live with whatever performance impact the AV has on your games, which is probably small.

 

everything that runs on a PC has some impact on performance so its pretty obvious a security suite is going to have an impact,and yes some have a bigger hit than others:-its up to users to decide the performance hit compared to protection offered they are willing to put up with and then wind up the settings to suit what they feel is acceptable

 

I think either or both is true:

- the machine was so fast that the presence of an AV made little statistical difference

- there was something wrong with the configuration of the Control (the AV-less PC) that produced the slower performance.

 

I don't think they specified if windows defender was active or not. I know some AV packages disable it, others don't. Hopefully they disabled it for all tests for a apple to apple comparison.

 

rofl good one!

 

no
...

 

So do antivirus programs have an impact on video game framerate? Should I disable Avast! when playing games?

 

Doesn't it have a gaming mode and if so does that make any difference?

 

if you have a machine like mine (Pentium R, two gigs of RAM with an Intel processor) anything can slow it down but for the normal computer nothing should slow it down that much

 

Well they had a fast computer and it lowered their DirectX 9 test framerate 10fps. Avast!s gaming mode just auto-decides on things I think, instead of interrupting your game with alerts.

 

No offense, no trolling intended, but this looks like a benchmark test sponsored by GFI... just see the link at the bottom of the last page... a link to "Enter to Win a Tom's Enthusiast PC with Vipre Antivirus here." Don't give me that!!!
And I must say I'm a happy VIPRE user.

 

I think I'm gonna install them all.

 

In my opinion, a lot of it depends on the computer's hardware etc.

For me, I don't really notice any slowdowns.

 

I completely agree with you.

Cheers!
Ziaul