Malwarebytes doesn't like some games, and guess what happens?

[TheodoreM]

Three perfect examples are Capcom Arcade Stadium, Sturmfront the Mutant War and Velocity 2X. Note, most games DO work ok, but I have noticed a few with MWB having issues that I have never noticed with other security software.

In any case, what happened was, I launched the aforementioned game(s) and the FPS would start at a normal level, with Capcom for example, that game is locked at 60 FPS flat.

Then within about 20 seconds, the FPS counter would wind down, sort of like a reverse ramp, and end up at about 2 to 10 FPS and never going higher.

The game is therefore impossible to play. I was pulling my hair out, but then finally guessed that it might be a MWB issue, so all I did was add the install folder of the affected games to MWB exclusions, and voila, the games are suddenly back to normal!

Sturmfront went from 2 FPS to 240 in an instant! And initially I returned that game cause I thought it was broken, but re bought it on Steam when I realised what was happening with the other two games, in case that was the problem for that one too, and indeed it was.

Have you guys heard of this phenomenon before?

[AdvancedSetup]

I don't play games, but my initial guess would be that something the games are doing is probably triggering one of our protection modules to look at it closer which causes the issue. Adding an exclusion is the normal method to control conflicts.

 

[TheodoreM]

Yeah that makes sense, thanks, but I once waited for over an hour and nothing changed, as I wanted to see what would happen. And Sturmfront, for example, is a TINY install.

It's almost as if Malware Bytes is stuck in a perpetual loop scanning the same folder over and over again.

If I do a custom scan of the folder, Malware Bytes very quickly says it's clean.

If I do a deep scan of the game drive (there's only a few on there at present anyway), it says all clean.

The only thing that is worrying my paranoid mind is - "am I losing performance in gaming generally and I don't know about it"?

But I would  hate to disable MWB completely whilst gaming as the computer is still connected to the net, and I often pause for a break and do something else on the computer.. so...

I guess for now the only workaround is the allow list.

However, I will say, I am a bit obsessed with performance testing and getting every last drop out of something.. When I was in the computer music circles I was known to test Audio workstations and plugins to their absolute limit, I spent thousands of hours doing it. 

So, if anyone is interested, what I propose is a sort of long term study to see exactly what effect Malwarebytes is having on games in general. What do you think?

I could take a random sampling of say 5 AAA games and 5 very high frame rate indie games, and do detailed performance analysis and see just how much, if any, FPS one loses with MWB in the best case scenario, i.e. the games will be ones that I have always considered to work fine with MWB.

If no one is interested I will probably still do it for myself anyway as my curiosity is piqued now!

[AdvancedSetup]

If others on the forum wish to spend their time doing so that's up to them. As I said, I don't play games and have no issues with MB running on my systems so I'm not interested in spending time monitoring. I used to do all that stuff years ago but after 30 years of doing support I just use the computer now instead of playing with tweaking it all the time.