Best antivirus software for gamers: Our top 5!
Online gaming has become a worldwide phenomenon, attracting millions of players who spend hours immersed in virtual worlds. However, the growing popularity of online gaming has also made it a prime target for cybercriminals looking to steal personal information, hack accounts, or disrupt gameplay. This has led to a surge in demand for antivirus software specifically designed for gaming. In this article, we will take a closer look at the best antivirus software for gamers, analyzing their features and benefits, to help you make an informed choice and ensure your online gaming experience remains safe and enjoyable.
List of Top 5 Antivirus for Gamers
1. Bitdefender – An excellent choice for those who enjoy gaming on their PC. With its automatic gaming mode and extensive range of features, you can rest assured that your gaming experience will be both secure and fast.
2. Norton – A great antivirus software option for gaming PCs that includes a gaming extension. It provides robust security measures, offers decent processing speeds, and incorporates optimizations specifically designed with gamers in mind.
3. ESET NOD32 – A versatile antivirus software designed for gaming PCs. With its exceptional threat detection rates and a wide range of additional features to combat cyber theft, it provides comprehensive protection against various online threats.
4. McAfee – An advanced antivirus protection along with an array of features such as parental controls and a smart firewall. Its powerful firewall provides an additional layer of protection against malicious attacks, ensuring your online gaming experience remains safe and worry-free.
5. TotalAV – An antivirus software that offers fast and reliable protection against various online threats. Additionally, it comes with system clean-ups tools that optimize the performance of your PC, ensuring that it runs smoothly and includes a high quality VPN to provide an extra layer for security.
Why do you need an Antivirus for gaming?
Hackers can target gamers in a variety of ways. For example, they often pose as game administrators and send phishing links to gamers via in-game messaging systems or email in order to steal your login credentials or payment information. Keyloggers and other malware can be hidden in mods or game files acquired from the internet. Nevertheless, security flaws in legitimate games or data breaches on gaming websites may be leveraged maliciously by third parties. Everyone knows that the internet can be a dangerous place, and that it’s wise to protect your device as good as possible. We have written an article about the greates online threats of today that you would be protecting your device from, not to scare you, but to keep you and your device safe.
Protecting yourself from malware is not the only reason you might want a gaming antivirus. Some gaming antiviruses can even improve your device’s performance with features such as game boosters and system tune-up tools, while limiting their effect on your gameplay by suspending scans and notifications while you’re in game or using cloud-based scanners. It is important to check beforehand the software’s features to get the correct antivirus, as not all antiviruses that are suitable for gaming contain all of these capabilities.
What are the features that you need to look for antivirus for gaming?
1. Game boosters – Antivirus software is an essential tool for protecting your device and personal information from various online threats. However, it can sometimes interfere with your gaming experience, causing lags or performance issues. To address this problem, many antivirus programs offer a game mode feature. This feature is specifically designed to optimize your device’s CPU and GPU performance while gaming, allowing the antivirus software to run in the background without affecting gameplay. With a game-mode enabled antivirus, you can enjoy uninterrupted and smooth gaming sessions while keeping your device protected.
2. Cloud-based scanning solution – It is a feature of antivirus software that relies on cloud technology to perform scans and other antivirus-related activities, rather than using your device’s CPU power. By doing so, it frees up your device’s processing units, allowing you to enjoy the best gaming experience without any lags or interruptions. With cloud-based scanning, you can benefit from enhanced protection against online threats while ensuring that your device’s performance is not compromised.
3. Device cleaning – It is an essential feature that antivirus software should have. It involves removing junk and cached files, as well as terminating unnecessary background processes to free up space on your device. By doing so, it frees up RAM and memory, which significantly improves your device’s overall performances.
4. In-game threat detection – It is a crucial feature that can protect you against various online threats while gaming. With the rise of in-game malware, it’s essential to have an antivirus program that can detect and alert you about potential threats before they can harm your device. This advanced feature can monitor and scan incoming data from multiplayer servers in real-time, providing you with immediate protection against harmful code, files, and links.
Top 5 antivirus for gaming: Detailed list
1. Bitdefender – Best overall antivirus for gaming
Bitdefender is a top-tier provider for the best gaming PC antivirus software, thanks to its automatic gaming mode and feature-rich antivirus protection suite at excellent prices. Bitdefender has several features that ensure excellent gaming performance while providing robust protection for your systems, these features include:
– Bitdefender Total Security’s Profiles
This feature includes an automatic gaming mode that minimizes the antivirus impact to your resources while gaming by limiting background monitoring and push notifications.
– High malware detection rate
With Bitdefender receiving the highest marks for security and virus detection rates in independent tests by AV-Test and AV-Comparatives.
– Real Time monitoring / Advanced Threat Defense
This feature uses heuristics method to scan your device for potentially dangerous programs and activity, ensuring complete protection at all times.
– An Integrated VPN & Password Manager
The VPN is used in helping to hide your IP address and protect against DDoS attacks and doxxing. On the other hand, the password manager generates and stores login information for game launchers and websites.
Additionally, Bitdefender offers a free version of its software with functional malware detection suitable for gaming. The premium version is also affordable and offers features like profiles, VPN, and password manager. Click here to buy the products.
2. Norton
Norton is an ideal antivirus solution for PC gamers with its focus on gaming and a host of additional features. Norton 360 for gamers is specifically designed to provide secure and fast gaming experience. Here are some of the features that make Norton 360 for Gamers stand out:
– Game Optimizer
This feature of Norton offers powerful CPU performance for your game while disabling other apps to minimize background processes that might affect your gaming experience. This feature provides smoother visuals and better overall gaming experience while staying safe.
– Real-time Protection
It defends against phishing attacks in chats, malware,and vulnerabilities in games and launchers.
– 50GB Cloud backups
With this feature, Norton 360 for Gamers provides an automatic cloud backup that stores your game clips online, freeing up space on your own PC.
– PC Safecam
Norton 360 offers a webcam protection by blocking unauthorized access.
– Additional Features
Norton also provides VPN to prevent DDos and doxxing attacks, as well as a password manager to secure your logins to gaming platforms and launchers. Norton also has a dark web monitoring feature, full-screen detection, and notification optimization to minimize interruptions while gaming.
However, Norton does not have a free version, but you can use its 7-day free trial to test its features from their website. Click here to buy from Lizenso.
3. ESET NOD32
ESET NOD 32 is an all-in-one antivirus solution for gaming PCs that provides robust malware protection, gaming mode, and various features. Its exceptional performance, protection and usability results have been demonstrated in many tests. These are the key features that enhance your safety and improve your gaming experience with ESET:
– ESET Multi-Platform Protection
This feature of ESET allows gamers to protect multiple devices at once, regardless of the platform. A single license covers all devices running on Windows, macOS, Linux or Android, allowing users to lay on one PC and work on another securely at the same time.
– Flawless malware detection rates
ESET has consistently demonstrated perfect detection rates for all types of malware in independent lab tests and internal testing.
– ESET Home Network Security
This feature is to protect your home network while gaming, ESET has implemented an additional security feature that detects any suspicious activity related to your home network. It will notify you if anyone tries to connect to it and inspect incoming packets for threatening attachment.
– Additional Features
ESET also provides anti-theft protection, including location tracking and phantom account creation, to mislead intruders. With the premium security plan, you will also receive a password manager to enhance password safety and management.
4. McAfee
McAfee Total Protection is a comprehensive internet security software with advanced parental controls that provide content filtering, device usage limit, and device tracking for mobile users.
Features:
– Optimization tools
These tools of McAfee come with features such as ‘Quick Clean’ and ‘App Boost’, these features free up space on your PC and boost game performance by diverting CPU power away from background processes.
– Customizable Firewall
This feature is very useful, it can detect and block potential attacks, while allowing your friends to connect to your gaming server.
– 100% malware detection rates
McAfee has a really powerful malware detection and antivirus scanner and it won’t slow down your system during scans. However, it doesn’t have a dedicated game mode to optimize your gaming experience, and manually silencing notifications can be a hassle. The good news is that you can simply schedule scans to prevent interruptions while gaming.
– Additional features
McAfee Total Protection also offers parental controls, this comprehensive feature allows you to manage screen time, content filtering and mobile device tracking, making it perfect for gamers and parents.
McAfee does not offer a free version, however you can make use of the 30-day-money-back guarantee, which allows you to try the software and see if it suits your needs. If you are not satisfied, McAfee will simply refund your purchase. If you think that McAfee is perfect for you, check out our deals at Lizenso for a better price.
Read more detailed about McAfee’s antivirus here.
5. TotalAV
TotalAV is a top-performing antivirus program for PC gamers due to its exceptional ability to detect and prevent malware while keeping CPU usage low for uninterrupted gaming. Although not specifically designed for games, TotalAV’s performance and security tools provide a smooth and secure gaming experience.
Here’s why TotalAV is among the best antivirus for gaming:
– Real-time protection
This feature scans all installs and downloads, including games, to detect viruses and other threats.
– Performance optimization tools
These tools clean junk and duplicate files and identify areas where performance can be improved, resulting in reduced lag and improved device performance.
– Great malware detection
It offers rapid elimination of potential threats and viruses targeting or infecting your PC.
– Additional Features
TotalAV includes a built-in VPN, password manager, and browser extension to prevent DDoS attacks and keep logins secure, and avoid accidental downloads of any malwares.
TotalAV offers a free version that includes anti-malware and anti-phishing protection, but the premium packages provide more advanced features such as real-time protection, ransomware protection, cloud scanning, and performance. Unfortunately, we at Lizenso don’t offer TotalAV yet, however, we will keep you updated when we add TotalAV to our product range.
Price Comparison
At Lizenso, we offer antivirus programs of the above-listed (excl. TotalAV) brands for affordable prices. Please note that the prices below are up-to-date as of March 2023.
Bitdefender: The Bitdefender Total Security is available in a 2-year subscription for 57.95€.
Norton: The Norton 360 Deluxe antivirus is available in two versions: for 3 devices it costs 13.95€/year or for 5 devices it is 15.95€/year.
ESET: The ESET Smart Security Premium subscription for 3 devices costs 56.95€ for a year. The NOD32 version is available per device for 28.95€ in a 2-year subscription.
McAfee: The McAfee Total Protection subscriptions are starting from 13.95€/year for one device. You can choose also for 5 or 10 devices.
You can check the antivirus for gamers we offer at Lizenso and compare the real-time prices by clicking here.
Does antivirus slow down your gaming?
Antivirus software has sometimes the reputation for making computers slower, but present antivirus programs now come with a number of tools and features that are intended to prevent slowdowns such as cloud-based anti-malware engines or system optimization tools. Typically, slowdowns have logical causes, which may or may not be related to your antivirus program. Although some web shields and VPNs, as well as some antivirus software’s full disk scans, can slow down your device, most system delays are caused by other reasons (like malware, junk files, outdated software, or just too many programs running on your device).
What issues could you face with Antivirus while gaming?
As noted above, antivirus in some cases can have an unwished impact on your PC, including the performance of gaming. If you experience lags, slow-downs or by chance crashes when gaming, it is worth checking the settings of security scans within your antivirus program. Several PCs can slow down while running antivirus checks. The majority of consumers install antivirus software and then have the scans run at the time that is set by default. The default setting isn’t always the most practical one. It’s preferable to schedule virus checks for times when you know you won’t be using the PC or playing games. This has the advantage of being applicable to any antivirus product, including ones without game modes. The scans can be scheduled for late at night or during the day while you are at work. Because there’s no possibility of a scan starting up in the middle of a game, you may play without being concerned that your computer’s performance will suffer. Otherwise, trying to scan your computer while a game is running may have an adverse effect on both the antivirus and the game’s performance.
Conclusion
Overall, having an antivirus not only protects your PC from online dangers, malicious attacks, and phishing, but it can also increase your gaming performance and experience. While security features are undeniably important, some players are discouraged from using an antivirus because they believe it may slow down the game. Not to worry, the majority of the antiviruses on our list are either performance-oriented or include a gaming mode that minimizes background alerts and CPU consumption. As a result, you can be confident that your gaming experience will be quick and secure.
