Game mode 'recognition' badly implemented and not configurable

system · 2017-02-07T18:54:36.000Z

The ability of Avast to disable notifications and stuff during gaming has been around for long, but this Game Mode has been bugging me since today’s update. It insist on adding every full-screen application to the games list of Game Mode. If I undo the action, I’ll get the notification again, so I have two options: disable Game Mode, or allow every auto-added thing to be there and disable game mode for it.

First of all, considering every application which goes to full screen beyond the Windows desktop is imho a very severe error, and an oversimplification. I run many applications which change to exclusive graphics mode due to my design hobby. But even the simplest things go in the same bucket for Avast, for example XNViewMP, an excellent, popular and free image browser/viewer, and VLC, a multimedia viewer without need of codecs, also very popular and free. Really, an image viewer and a video viewer? Something is very flawed.

And second, that auto-detection can’t be disabled. It’s constantly running. So again only two options, both bad: disable Game Mode, or manually configure each new entry just because Avast wants me to. It’s good that Avast tries to help users, but I know better than Avast when I install another game, and I bet there’s a large part of Avast users which don’t use computers mainly for gaming.

Thumbs down for the auto-detection implementation, and double thumbs down for the fact that it can’t be disabled.

Thus I request that, hopefully soon, this auto-detection is improved, and at least, it can be disabled so I can forget about it until I install a new game.

RejZoR · 2017-02-07T18:58:37.000Z

I’ve had a long chat with avast! developer for this component. They are going to make changes to it, but it missed the initial release date (today). There is a change planned for next update which should come fairly soon.

Btw, if you remove the app/game, avast! remembers that and will not auto-add it again.

EDIT:
I’ve sent link of this thread to the developer.

Eneko · 2017-02-07T20:26:20.000Z

Hi.
I think it might be a good idea to add an option in game mode’s settings to disable the auto-detection feature.
In that case, you could have game mode activated with auto-detection disabled and being able to add your games.

RejZoR · 2017-02-07T21:01:14.000Z

They are trying to over-engineer a feature where most gamers would be perfectly happy with 100% manual adding of games. If I want it there, I’d add it. Or even if it ads them automatically, there should be plain and simple option to re-arrange stuff. But avast! guys insist on doing it more “n00b” friendly and grouping EXE’s from same game into 1 entry (which at the moment for Steam games just breaks the whole thing). Dunno. But I’m in a way glad that people outside avast! and Evangelist group share same opinion. With link to this thread sent to the dev working on this thing, maybe it’ll convince him… We’ll see. I’ll be annoying him further, that’s for sure.

Charyb-0 · 2017-02-07T21:11:16.000Z

Here is an explanation.

https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=196050.msg1363528#msg1363528

sj.vegetto · 2017-02-07T21:44:14.000Z

imo it didnt help game run anybetter, So I removed one less process i dont need

Hried · 2017-02-07T21:49:52.000Z

We hear you and will add an option to disable the auto-detect in next possible update. But you should see gradual improvement to the auto-detection mechanism in the next few days as we gather enough data to start flagging things that are not games to remove them from the auto-detection algorithm (don’t worry, nothing is personally identifiable). I’m interested in repeated additions though, do you really get the same thing autodetected for the second time after you manually remove it? Does it happen for others too?

system · 2017-02-08T17:01:45.000Z

I actually get the same program reported after removed from the notification with the ‘undo’ it provides. I think it has to do with arguments, since 90% of the times I launch the programs I used as examples (XNViewMP & VLC) there’s at least one argument, the image or video going to be viewed; however Avast think they are different games so it tries to readd them. I thought only the executable name would be relevant.

I don’t know if it has changed today since I have disabled Game Mode completely. Messing with process priorities is not something I want an antivirus to do.

Another thing is that real-time priority processes also get affected, even with Game Mode disabled (after several reboots). For example, if I use all 4 of my cores to compress images, whenever one of the processes loads a new image Winamp stutters for half a second. Note that Winamp is set to run at real-time priority, and it rarely hits 1% of CPU usage; and the image compressors (PNGOut) are running on lower-than-normal priority. This happened since the reboot needed after the upgrade yesterday. I’ve tried my best to get Winamp to stop producing this stutter which never did no matter what I was doing (including 4 PNGOut processes while copying large amounts of date from one HD to another), and the only change in my system was yesterday’s Avast upgrade. If I could roll back to the previous version, I would.

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