Hello Bitdefender Team and Community,
I’d like to share a technical observation that might be affecting how Bitdefender — and potentially other security products — are being evaluated in AV-Comparatives’ performance tests, especially since the lab switched from PCMark to the UL Procyon Benchmark Suite as the measurement platform.
⚙️ Background
Windows 11 includes Smart App Control (SAC), which is enabled by default in Evaluation Mode on clean installations.
This feature relies on the same process used by Windows Defender (MsMpEng.exe) and the Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) subsystem to perform file-reputation and trust verification.
Even after a third-party antivirus is installed, SAC often remains active and continues to perform background reputation checks.
đź’ˇ The potential issue
The UL Procyon Benchmark does not modify Windows security settings.
Therefore, if SAC is active, it continues running during the benchmark.
Some antivirus products — including Bitdefender and ESET — do not automatically disable SAC, which means that MsMpEng.exe may still operate in parallel with the third-party antivirus during testing.
This can cause duplicate file-access inspections and a slight increase in CPU and I/O usage, which could negatively influence the performance score.
Products that automatically register themselves as trusted providers in the Windows kernel (for example, Kaspersky) may temporarily disable WDAC/SAC and thus avoid this overhead — potentially creating a small methodological imbalance.
🔍 Summary
- SAC uses the same core engine as Windows Defender and remains active by default.
- UL Procyon does not disable SAC automatically.
- This may penalize security solutions that leave SAC untouched.
đź’ Suggestion: it might be worthwhile for the Bitdefender engineering team to verify whether SAC remains active during independent benchmarks and, if confirmed, consider documenting the behavior or recommending that testing labs disable SAC prior to running performance evaluations.
This would help ensure that comparative results reflect the real-world performance of Bitdefender under normal user conditions.
