FO4 and Windows Defender Real Time Protection

[Wolfsun]

I'd say that I've got a very, very high end gaming machine. It has 16Gb DDR4 RAM, i7 5820k 6 core processor that runs at 3.3Ghz with Turbo Boost, nVidia GTX970 w/4GB VRAMM (really 3.5 don't know why they insist on calling it 4) all plugged into an MSI X99 chip MB. Got a 256GB SSD drive with a 1TB WD HDD. I run W7 Pro.

It runs everything I've got at a steady 60 FPS with no hiccups - everything - including FO4 with every graphic option set to Ultra/max at 1920X1080p.

Well...

It did - until I switched Windows Defender to real time protection. (I've run WinDef for a long time). Until a few days ago I always just ran it with real time protection turned off and did a full scan once a week on Saturday night along with a Full scan by Kaspersky.

Last time I ran a full scan with both products WinDef got 3 hits on malware (1st time ever). So I decided to turn off WinDef real time protection mode after taking out the trash.

A few days ago I noticed FO4 had dropped to an average of 43FPS with occasional drops to the high 30's. WTF! Spent not a little time trying to figure out what the heck caused that. At first I thought it might have been the 1.3 patch but that came out and ran at 60FPS for a while before I noticed the issue. Then I tried disabling a couple of the graphical mods I'd enabled and no joy there. I ran Iolo system mechanic and found nothing unusual or untoward. I'd installed Visual Studio 2013 in the last week but ruled that out because I couldnt' find any processes or services running that it would have loaded up.

And then it dawned on me. WD! Real time protection turned on. At first I didn't think that could be it. Kaspersky runs in real time and in the past I've had Avast, Norton and McCafee at one time or another and none of them caused graphical frame rate drops with real time protection turned on so why would WD?

But what the heck - it would only take a few seconds and then a reboot to turn WD's real time protection off and check so I did - turn off real time protection. Shut down the PC, rebooted and loaded up FO4.

Voila! Back to a rock steady 60 FPS everywhere on the map I traveled.

I find this a bit strange. I'm no Microsoft hater and couldn't imagine them putting something out that would eat up enough CPU cycles to cause a 33% frame rate drop on anything.

So I am wondering what gives, what could I have done to create the issue or is WD really that much of a CPU cycle hog?

Not that big of a deal really but one does wonder.

[Nite69]

I use Microsoft Security Essentials in windows 7, not had any problems with it and games.

[Hobo Misanthropus]

Talk about overprotection.

BitDefender + UMatrix Plugin on Chrome + MalwareBytes is all you should ever need. I do all my "Dangerous Browsing" on a device that doesn't cost $1500+

[Scoob]

I use W10, but Windows Defenders Real-time protection is enabled by default. I just tried turning it OFF, to see if it'd make any difference to my CPU load (or fps in general) during game play, but it appears unchanged.

Note: I have an older, but still decent system for the most part:

2500k @ 4.6ghz
2x GTX 680 @ 1.2ghz
32gb DDR3 1600
2xSSD RAID0 (system and Steam folder)

Game was running well - typically 60fps - with the following settings:

Resolution: 1920x1200
AA: TAA (Best Quality)
AF: 16 Samples

Texture Quality: Ultra
Shadow Quality: High
Shadow Distance: Medium
Decal Quantity: High
Lighting Quality: High
Godrays Quality: High
DoF: Standard (Low) - hate the effect, this setting looks nicer to me.
Ambient Occlusion: HBAO+ (Ultra)

Screen Space Refections: Enabled
Wetness: Enabled
Rain Occlusion: Enabled
Motion Blur: Disabled (Another effect I don't like)
Lens Flare: Enabled

View distances are all set to Maximum / Ultra.

Game plays really well for me at these settings, though I imagine if SLI didn't work I'd need to turn quite a few things down. Luckily for me, SLI worked day 1 with my 680's when I forced AFR2 in the driver. Now I just use the default SLI profile of course, now NV have created one.

Cheers,

Scoob.

[Hobo Misanthropus]

I was under the impression that SLI doesn't actually work on Fallout 4, at the very least it offers absolutely no benefit except eating more power.

EDIT: I'm a ♥♥♥♥♥♥. SLI works fine, it's Crossfire that doesn't work on Fallout 4.