At first I thought my system had a faulty video card, a XFX GTX275 and so took the issue to the XFX support site but after spending some time investigating the problem myself I found the culprit to be the BitDefender 2010 "Active Virus Control" (AVC) feature.
Typical scenario where the problem is evident:
When playing modern games (e.g., ANY game built on the Unreal Engine 3) whenever the game attempts to load resources (textures, audio, music, etc, etc...) there are extreme performance issues to such an extent that the game becomes unplayable.
In addition to the performance problems I am experiencing very frequent display adaptor crashes (the error reported is "nvlddmkm, display adaptor stopped responding but has successfully recovered") hence why I originally took this issue to XFX support. However I am yet to confirm whether BitDefender is the cause of this too or whether that problem is merely a symptom of the performance problems.
It took me a while to narrow it down (all the while bugging the guys at the XFX support site too) but it turns out that it's this Active Virus Control to blame. I have tried setting it to "Permissive" but if anything that actually made the problem worse.
The only way I have found to resolve the problem is to either disable AVC entirely or to add an exception for each game I want to play. However, I doubt that this problem has anything to do with games specifically and most likely, this is a more general problem that I'm just not noticing when doing regular productivity type stuff (because I have a pretty high spec system which is masking the problem).
I do not want to disable AVC as its surely one of the core features of the product (and indeed any antivirus for that matter) but the performance in demanding applications such as games is terrible. Manually adding exceptions to AVC for every demanding app I use would be incredibly annoying, doubly so because I need to switch users to be able to do anything in that area of the BitDefender 2010 configurator as it demands administrator privileges (why can't I do an in-place UAC privilege elevation like with most other tools such as this?).
At the very least, the facility to automatically deactivate AVC when in "Game Mode" would help but this is still far from ideal.
In addition to this problem I am also experiencing the problem of not being able to update BitDefender, even when logged in as a system administrator. Though from what I have read on these forums, this is already a known issue that we are waiting on an update to resolve.
So, any suggestions?
