Last week, we reported on an issue where users found that their newly installed Windows 1123H2 systems were experiencing lags, and some of them solved the problem by resetting Defender. While this issue is a bug rather than a feature of Defender, past anti-malware evaluations have shown that Microsoft Defender is indeed a bit of a system resource hog, although it's not the only one.
Both AV-TEST and AV-Comparatives have recently released their latest evaluation reports. In this article, we will analyze the pros and cons of the various anti-virus products tested from the perspective of system/performance impact. (If you want to know more about malware detection rankings, check out this article).
First up are the AV-Comparatives October 2023 performance test results. While Microsoft Defender performs well in most categories, it falls short when it comes to archiving/unarchiving (compression/decompression).
This test was conducted on a Windows 10 64-bit system, and if you're wondering how much of a difference Windows 11 makes, we recently tested two different scenarios, one comparing Windows 10 to a clean version of Windows 11, and the other with an in-place upgrade. Defender isn't the best in the "installed apps" category either.
Judging from the chart above, the worst-performing popular products appear to be McAfee, while the best-performing ones are Kaspersky, ESET, and Avira.
In addition, AV-Comparatives used the PCMark benchmark suite and combined the scores with its own AV-C score to create a composite impact score. Microsoft Defender is one of the worst products in this metric, with a total impact score of 18.6. The top performer is ESET, with an impact score of just 1.4.
Next is the data from AV-TEST, which was conducted on Windows 11. Like AV-Comparatives, Defender's performance was less than satisfactory, with a score of only 5.5 out of 6.0.
When we look at the score breakdown in the image below, we see that Defender performed poorly in the Installed Common Applications category. In fact, its performance this time around (34%) was slightly worse than last time (29%). This is also consistent with AV-Comparatives' findings. Another category where Defender shows regression is "Launching Popular Sites."
Speaking of Defender, a strange phenomenon is that Avast and AVG scored 6.0 and 5.5 points respectively in the AV-TEST performance category, even though they are both based on the same engine. Here's a side-by-side breakdown:
As you can see in the image above, the impact on the system seems to be basically similar, except when launching popular websites. For some reason, AVG seems to struggle in web browsing situations, as it shows a 34% hit, even though its performance should be about the same as Avast (19%). This is inconsistent with AV-Comparatives' report, and differences in operating systems may be the reason for this discrepancy.
According to AV-TEST's report, another popular product that hogs system resources is Norton, as it performs quite poorly on the "frequently installed applications" metric, similar to Windows Defender. However, this is not consistent with AV-Comparatives' data.
Data source:
AV-TEST||AV-Comparatives