Tag Archives: Performance

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AVG Performance PRO package is out!

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Do you think that slow-downs, crashes, and poor battery life only affect ageing Windows XP (or Vista) PCs or last-generation smartphones? Think again. Even the latest operating systems, such as Windows 10 and Android 6 (Marshmallow) still haven’t found a cure for performance, bottlenecks, storage hogs, and battery drainers.

Whether you’re running an older PC, smartphone or the sleekest, latest hardware, it’s crucial to keep it running at top performance from day one.

AVG Performance comes bundled with 3 products to help keep all of your Windows computers, tablets, Mac computers, and Android phones/tablets clean and fast. The AVG Zen platform is built into each product, so you can optimize all your devices from one place.

An overview of what’s new:

  • AVG PC TuneUp (Version 16.2): comes with a completely new interface, better cleaning and Windows 10 support. It’s available as a standalone application if you just want the PC version
  • AVG Cleaner for Android: has a new App Manager and a fresh design. Available on the Google Play store
  • AVG Cleaner for Mac (Version 14): has a fresh design and new iPhoto & video cache cleaning. Available from the Mac OS X store.

AVG’s products and suites will now be auto-updated on a continual basis, so if you purchase AVG Performance you will no longer need to worry about keeping your products up to date.

Let’s get to into the detail of what’s new:

 

NEW AVG PC TuneUp (version 16.2)

AVG PC TuneUp

Remember how quickly your PC ran when you first got it? The latest version of AVG PC TuneUp helps you keep your computer at peak performance even more so than before:

  • NEW Tuning Dashboard: Gives you faster access to all tuning features so you can easily see performance potential.
  • ENHANCED PC cleaning: Now cleans up hidden and leftover files from even more Steam games, your Download folder and other applications like VMware.
  • NEW Support for Windows 10

So you may ask: PC tuning? Why would I need that on my new machine? Well, whether you’ve got a 2008-era desktop PC or a shiny new ultrabook, AVG PC TuneUp can do something for you. In our internal tests, we looked at how we could improve performance on both new and old machines, here are some of the results*:

PC TuneUp results

 

AVG Cleaner for Android 

AVG Cleaner for Android

AVG Cleaner for Android helps you clean up your Android phone or tablet more easily, and can help keep tabs on performance-draining apps better than ever before, thanks to:

NEW App Manager: The new ‘App Manager’ feature gives you an immediate overview of renegade apps from a single screen and helps you get rid of them:

  • Running Apps: Shows running apps and how much RAM they’re consuming.
  • Unused Apps: Identifies apps that the you haven’t used in a long time.
  • Data Usage, Battery Usage and Storage: Helps you spot the largest apps and the ones with the most battery and mobile traffic drain.

Curious to try it out for yourself? Download it from the Google Play store for free – if you like what you see – upgrade to the PRO version and benefit from improved battery life enhancements, too.

 

AVG Cleaner for Mac (version 14)

AVG Cleaner for Mac

AVG Cleaner for Mac scans for hidden data trash and unwanted duplicate files that gather on Mac computers through everyday use, helping to free up disk space for more of your precious photos, music, and other files.

We’ve added lots of new features for all you Mac fans out there:

  • FRESH Design: The new Cleaner for Mac app sports a new user interface.
  • NEW iPhoto Cache & video cache: iPhoto creates its own “cache” folders which help speed up the viewing of photos, but also take up more space over time. With help from user feedback we’ve now implemented a means to remove iPhoto caches effectively for deleted photos.

You can try our Performance package as a 30-day trial from www.avg.com/performance.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll show you how these products work in greater detail including some step-by-step guides. Stay tuned.

 * The results from our internal test lab are indicative only. Your results may vary.

AVG

Windows 10 vs. 150 Programs vs. AVG PC TuneUp!

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To understand the effect of 3rd party programs, such as iTunes or Adobe Creative Suite, on your typical home computer, we installed 150 of the most popular programs of 2015 from sources such as Download.com, Softpedia, Top 10-20 lists etc.) on two devices, the HP Spectre x360 (Core i5 2.5 GHz) and the Asus UX-501 (Core i7 3.6 GHz), and measured performance on both without the optimization of AVG PC TuneUp and after, with it enabled.

Experiment complete: This is how our desktop and taskbar looked after the installation of 150+ popular programs. It was beyond slow! Can AVG PC TuneUp help with this mess?

150 apps

Once we installed AVG PC TuneUp, we literally went through every single tool that helps improve performance, such as AVG Program Deactivator, Turbo Mode, Startup Manager, Registry Defrag or Startup Optimizer

The results….

 

1. PC Startup Time: Windows

For “boot time” tests, we used Microsoft’s “Windows® Performance Toolkit”: It’s used by software and hardware makers to test the impact of battery life and performance of their products on typical machines and I consider it one of the most accurate testing tools out there.

Under the load of more than 150 applications, even the more powerful Asus UX-501 suffered as countless startup items, services, drivers and scheduled tasks were loaded which made the machine barely usable in the first couple of minutes.

It’s worth noting that the Windows desktop, the taskbar and all icons were visible within one minute on all devices, but weren’t usable: That’s why we measured total boot time until the very last program was loaded and the PCs or laptops were actually usable.

After we optimized the PC using all the various performance tools included in the 2016 release of AVG PC TuneUp, boot up time dropped between 32-77%.

 


 

However, this theoretical number doesn’t reflect how the machine actually “feels”: In the case of the Asus UX-501, the Windows Assessment Console also showed the actual time to desktop. In all cases, the web, games or office applications were instantly usable after the boot.

 

2. Internet Explorer Startup Time

Again, to measure how long it takes to achieve a simple task such as loading a program, I used Windows Assessment Toolkit. I wanted to see how much of an impact the load of 150 programs has on load time of a simple browser:

 

Internet Explorer 10 launched within 1,37 seconds on both devices, mostly due to their fast Solid State Disks. However, even on these faster devices these times went down to 0,45 and 1,2 seconds after the optimization with AVG PC TuneUp.

 

3. Performance while playing GTA V

Let’s see how much of an impact 150 programs and the optimization using AVG PC TuneUp has on the more fun tasks, such as gaming. In this example I used one of the top hits of 2015, Grand Theft Auto V, which includes a built-in benchmarking tool.

Unfortunately, having installed the 150 programs on the Asus UX-501, the benchmark frequently crashed so I could only look at the performance on the HP Spectre x360. it achieved only 24,4 fps under the load, but once I optimized the laptop using AVG PC TuneUp, frame-rates crawled to over 30 fps in some scenarios and averaged at around 29,9 which is considered smooth gameplay.

 

4. Performance while gaming

The de-factor standard for measuring gaming performance, Futuremark 3DMark, is my next test to measure how games in general perform on a specific device.

Once I got rid of all the extra load on these PCs, I saw quite some improvements in the final 3DMark score:

 

the HP Spectre managed to achieve 118 more points, whereas the much faster UX-501 (with its 960M) got 279 additional points back once all the optimization using AVG PC TuneUp was complete. Some gamers buy new hardware or overclock their devices just for this kind of improvement.

 

5. Writing, Web Browsing and Video Chat Performance

The next test involved the benchmarking tool PCMark 8 which uses real-life scenarios such as browsing the web, Office 2013, Adobe Creative Suite and other tools to recreate a typical home and business scenario.

It measures the exact time it takes to complete tasks down to the millisecond:

 

*Results in Seconds

 

**Results in points

Note: The numbers you see in the graphs for the Asus UX-501 represent the time it took to complete the browsing benchmarks. That’s because the 150 programs interrupted some additional benchmarks (which we didn’t take into account) and thus PCMark couldn’t spit out a final score. The differences were ultimately the same, though. On the HP Spectre x360, however, the benchmarks ran through just fine and showed an increase of 8%. Nice!

 

6. Office 2013 Performance

The next test involved PCMark running automated actions in Word, PowerPoint and Excel to measure performance, such as converting and calculating a huge Excel file:

 

An almost 50% increase while performing complex animations in PowerPoint, calculations in Excel or documents in word is a noticeable improvement. It also goes to show that the impact of 150+ popular applications can, in some cases, have quite an impact on speed.

 

7. Adobe Creative Suite Performance

Many professionals can’t live without Adobes Creative Suite which includes tools like PhotoShop, InDesign or Illustrator. Given that you’re working with a lot of heavy files, your PC needs to focus all of its resources on the task:

Again, my trusty benchmarking tool PCMark helps out here: it automatically performs complex tasks such as applying a filter to a huge PhotoShop file or putting together an InDesign document and measures the time it took to complete the tasks.

In the end, I again got a score for the performance under the load of 150 programs – and once I optimized it using AVG PC TuneUp:

Not a huge improvement, but definitely a nice boost for anyone working with Adobe Creative Suite.

 

8. Battery Life while watching a movie

When you’re on a long flight or train ride, you really need your battery to keep up with you while you’re binge-watching TV shows or movies. Unfortunately, the additional background load and Windows 10’s default power management settings had quite some effect on one of my devices:

Under load, the HP Spectre gave in after 4 ½ hours. Once I tuned the device to its maximum, freed it from all the resource hogs and activated Economy Mode and Flight Mode, battery life went up to almost 10 hours. That’s crazy. Even on the Asus UX-501 I managed to get an additional 20 minutes.

 

9. Disk Cleaning Tests

Performance and battery life isn’t all when measuring the performance of a computer: over time, Windows, applications and browsers accumulate Gigabytes of data. Case in point: even on the newly purchased mobile workstation (Asus UX-501), the installation of 150+ programs and the upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10 accumulated to roughly 38,5 Gigabytes of unnecessary files

The HP Spectre had only about 2.7 GB, but that accumulated over the time of only a few days following a clean install of Windows 10.

Verdict

Windows 10 is arguably Microsoft’s best operating system. It has improved in some scenarios when compared to Windows 8.1 and is a highly stable and smooth-running OS. However, it still suffered under the the load of 150 programs.

Once we fired all of AVG PC TuneUp’s performance guns at it, performance improved.

One of the key benefits of AVG PC TuneUp is that it helps alleviate performance load by using a feature called Program Deactivator which temporarily turns off programs that you don’t use, and enables them on the fly again when you need them, leaving you with a usable system!

Have you tried AVG PC TuneUp for Windows 10? Click here to give it a try.

AVG

Performance Shootout: Windows 8.1 versus Windows 10

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One of the first things you see when reserving your free copy of Windows 10 is that it’s “designed for speed”, promising you faster boot times, resume times and more. But is Windows 10 really that much faster than its direct predecessor? We’ve put it to the test and show you how the new OS fares in multiple scenarios such as boot time, performance while working, smoothness of gaming or battery life.

The Device Tested

In our lab, we started our tests with a rather high-end multimedia notebook – the Asus UX-501.

Asus UX-501

It’s equipped with a Core i7 (which clocks up to 3.6 GHz), 16 GB of RAM, a rather powerful GeForce 960M GTX and a blazing-fast 128 GB SSD. It’s one of the hotter devices of 2015 and should definitely show if and how much Windows 10 was able to speed things up compared to the pre-installed Windows 8.1.

How we tested

To get reproduceable and comparable results of Windows 8.1 versus Windows 10, we clean-installed both versions and installed only the latest drivers as well as our speed testing software, such as PCMark 8. Then we prepared both installs with the following steps:

  • Put the devices in a controlled room with 23° celcius and 250 (+/- 50) lux
  • Set the power plan to “Balanced”
  • Run all scheduled tasks and automated tasks using the “Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks” command
  • Installed all updates
  • Left all Windows optimization features enabled
  • Repeated all benchmark tests three times and then averaged the results

So let’s have a look at the tests we performed before and after the upgrade to Windows 10 Build 10240 (final, including the latest updates as of July 27th):


1. PC Startup Time: Windows 

For “boot time” tests, we used Microsoft’s “Windows® Performance Toolkit”: These tools are used by software and hardware makers to test the impact of battery life and performance of their products on typical machines.


The difference isn’t huge, but it shows that Microsoft is working hard to shave off seven milliseconds of boot time: 9 versus 8,3 seconds isn’t something you feel on such a powerful device, but on a slower PC or laptop this could translate into a far higher benefit.

Winner: Windows 10

 

2. Internet Explorer Startup Time

During a typical work day, applications get launched and closed all the time. Long loading times aren’t just an annoyance to the user, they could even hinder his ability to work or browse the web properly. This is why we used Windows Assessment Toolkit to measure how long it takes to launch an application, in this example Internet Explorer, down to the millisecond.

Yet again, a reduction from 0,9 to 0,45 seconds is something only few people would notice – yet it’s more evidence how Microsoft continually improved performance in every aspect and handles application launch just a tad better than before.

Winner: Windows 10

 

3. Writing, Web Browsing and Video Chat Performance

The next test involved the benchmarking tool PCMark 8 which uses real-life scenarios such as browsing the web, Office 2013, Adobe Creative Suite and other tools to recreate a typical home and business scenario. It measures the exact time it takes to complete tasks down to the millisecond:

The numbers you see in the graphs represent the time it took to complete the browsing benchmarks. Unfortunately, in this instance, the results really weren’t that different. A 0,11s difference is completely within margin of error and doesn’t have any real-life effect.

Winner: Tie

 

4. Word, Powerpoint and Excel Performance

The next test involved PCMark running automated actions in Word, PowerPoint and Excel to measure performance, such as converting and calculating a huge Excel file:

We were impressed: In all test iterations, Windows 10 was able to run 8% faster when working with the Office suite.

Winner: Windows 10

 

5. Grand Theft Auto V performance

Thanks to the ubiquity of services like Steam and the increased sales of capable PCs or laptops, gaming applications are not just some of the most popular applications pn PCs, but also the most resource-intensive too. This is why we used the top game of 2015 Grand Theft Auto V and its built-in benchmark tool which measures the average FPS (Frames per seconds) for different scenes and scenarios of the game:

Windows 10 performed slightly slower, but also well within testing tolerance. However, one of the main benefits of Windows 10 is the exclusive implementation of Microsofts graphics platform DirectX 12 which is supposed to speed up games by to 50% – unfortunately, we’re still waiting for such titles so there’s no way to really put this to test.

Winner: Tie

 

6. Adobe Creative Suite Performance

While the last couple of tests focused more on consumer activities, such as browsing the web or working with Office, particularly IT professionals have a need for snappy performance. One such example is Adobe’s Creative Suite:

Again, Windows 10 showed better results: Likely due to the improved resource utilization and improved driver support.

Winner: Windows 10

 

7. Battery Life while Working

Microsoft promised better power management in Windows 10 and that it would save more battery life when on the go. We tested this using PCMark 8s work tests (in loop) until the battery ran dry. The result:

In all three test iterations, Windows 10 managed to run 9 minutes longer. Not a massive improvement, but definitely enjoyable.

Winner: Windows 10

 

8. Battery Life while gaming

Gaming is the number 1 battery drainer so it doesn’t come as a surprise that our tests were done rather quickly. Unfortunately, even with NVIDIAs latest drivers (as of July 28th), battery life on the 960M while playing GTA V went down rather than up:

A reduction of 13% in all of our tests. We’re hoping that NVIDIA and Microsoft are working closely on a new driver to fix this issue.

Winner: Windows 8.1

 

9. Battery Life while watching a movie

It came as a surprise that our movie tests showed some significant improvements for Windows 10. When watching a 1080p video clip in a loop using Windows Media Player under Windows 8.1, the laptop died after 2 hours and 25 minutes. However, when going to Windows 10 it lasted a whopping 3 Hours. Likely that Windows 10 does something in the background to reduce resource usage and just focus the power on the things necessary for movie playback:

Winner: Windows 10


Verdict

Windows 10 – even in its first release – a tad faster than Windows 8.1. But beware, it doesn’t do magic: some areas only improved marginally, whereas other areas (battery life) really jumped up noticeably.

However, we just tested a clean install of Windows 8.1 versus a clean Windows 10. The areas in which operating systems really suffer from performance is the gradual slowdown that occurs over time and with more and more programs or drivers installed. That’s why, in our next blog, we installed 150+ programs on new Windows 10 devices to see how much the new OS is resistant to this load – and what we, as AVG, can do about it! Stay tuned.

AVG

5 Reasons Why Windows 10 Needs a Proper Tune Up

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While Windows 10 is full of brand new features to help you get the best possible experience, I wanted to take a look under the hood and see if it was vulnerable to the same performance hogs as its predecessor Windows 8.1. I am of course talking about system slow down thanks to program load. YES, as crazy as it sounds, but just by installing programs on your desktop PC or laptop and simply using them you’re slowing it down a bit.

It is not noticeable at first, but the more programs you install, the more this slowdown creeps up on you. But why is that the case? And what can our own tool, AVG PC TuneUp, do about this? This blog has the answers.

 

Reduce The Daily Slowdown

PC TuneUp

More installed programs equal more processes and services going on in the background. Don’t believe us?
Using a professional analysis tool called Windows Assessment Toolkit, we measured the average resource consumption while working with Microsoft Office both under the load of 150 applications (see benchmarks below for more details) and once the device was optimized with AVG PC TuneUp:

Before (without AVG PC TuneUp)

Before

 

After (with AVG PC TuneUp)

After

 

The increased activity doesn’t just have an impact on performance, but on the total lifespan and power consumption, as well. Tools like AVG Program Deactivator, Startup Manager, Uninstall Manager or Turbo Mode help you decrease this activity and make your PC run smooth again.

 

To Solve Hard Disk Thrashing & Fragmentation

Background applications and 3rd party software can be responsible for a lot of unnecessary hard disk activity, even though you’re not actively using the programs. Of course, this also affects the total lifespan of all hardware components.

Then there’s the fragmentation phenomenon which occurs daily: Creating, copying, moving and deleting files causes hard disk data to be scattered all over the place which, in turn, reduces overall performance. AVG Drive Defrag restores perfect order to your hard drive while speeding up file access, boot times, and program launches.

Defrag

 

 

To Free Up Disk Space

Windows® and your programs constantly save log files, “Most Recently Used“ lists and temporary data on your hard disk – but “forget” to delete them. Over time, that leads to critical disk space issues and problems with you applications. AVG Disk Cleaner removes all of these types of files.

Clean Up

 

To Increase Battery Life & Reduce Power Consumption

Even Windows 10 doesn’t really turn off unnecessary hardware of your laptop when when you’re on the road or adjust to what you’re doing sufficiently. Our AVG PC TuneUp Economy Mode and Flight Mode result not just in increased battery life, but also reduced power consumption: Work longer and save on your power bills, thanks to an array of power-saving techniques such as smart CPU power control, power saving modes for your devices and the deactivation of power-hungry Windows features.

PC TuneUp

 

To Improve Stability

Windows 10 has its weak spots, just like Windows XP, Vista, 7 or 8. One of them is the registry and the way it’s built: Through daily usage of a PC or laptop, the registry could become cluttered with registry errors such as pointers to non-existent startup items, file types, programs, settings or hardware components no longer in use. This could result in some of the following problems:

  • Invalid startup entries: These leftover entries may cause startup errors.
  • Incorrect file type references: Causing files to be opened by the wrong program.
  • Incorrect uninstaller entries: Such entries lead to errors when installing or uninstalling applications.
  • Missing fonts: Causes fonts to not show up in programs.
  • Invalid ActiveX and COM component pointers: may lead to error messages when running applications.

1 Click

 

AVG PC TuneUp’s Automatic Maintenance feature and Registry Cleaner fix such issues on a regular basis.

AVG

Three Quick Tips to boost Windows 10 Performance

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Windows 10 also brought several new features and settings that can negatively impact performance. It is possible to tweak these features though and mitigate the system slowdown that they cause.

I explored the depths of Windows 10 and have come up with these three quick fixes to help you get your machine get the most out of the new operating system.

 

Turn off Notifications to conserve Power

W10 Action Center

 

Just like iOS or Android, Windows 10 now sports a notification center which gives you a good overview of new emails, updates, plugged in devices and more. Unfortunately, this area quickly becomes too crowded and can contribute to performance and battery drain as Windows 10 frequently checks all apps for new notifications.

My advice: Limit notifications! The fewer notifications you enable, the less impact it will have on your performance (and battery life on tablets and laptops). To disable them, click on the Start button and click on Settings. Go to System and Notifications and settings.

W10 Notifications

 

To turn off all notifications, flip the switch on Show app notifications. However, we recommend going through the list and make sure that your favorite applications like AVG PC TuneUp or AVG AntiVirus still keep you posted and updates on threats cleaned.

 

Turn off Windows Tips

You may have noticed that Windows 10 sometimes shows you tips and tricks for various features, such as how to get apps from the store. The app behind this is called „Show me tips“ which, for some reason, may cause high processor and RAM usage – you’ll notice that if your PC or laptop keeps spinning its fan and is very slow.

While I’m sure that Microsoft is working on a fix for this long-term, here’s how to prevent it from happening right now:

Open up the notification settings as described above and switch off Show me tips about Windows:

W10 Tips

 

This has helped a lot of people so far (see this Reddit thread for more).

 

Turn off dynamic color adaptation

The new Windows user interface tries to automatically adjust the color of the window frame and taskbar to the desktop wallpaper. However, there’s a bug which could increase CPU usage quite drastically and reduce your overall performance when this is enabled.

If you feel your PC is running slow, try the following: go to the Start menu and click on Settings. Next, head over to Personalization. Then go to Colors and switch off Automatically pick an accent color from my background.

W10 Accent Color

 

Done? Let us know if these three tips helped you improve your performance.

AVG

The Ultimate Witcher 3 Performance Guide

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I’ve never touched a Witcher game before but this one really captured me, not just for it’s great storyline or epic scope but how real the forests and the cities look and feel:

Witcher 3

With graphics like these, you need three things: a fine-tuned PC, a decent graphics card and the right settings. In this guide we’ll look at making the Witcher 3 even more beautiful than it already is and also make sure that it runs super smooth on your machine. Ready?

Can your PC run The Witcher 3?

To run The Witcher 3, you need a fairly powerful PC as CD Project RED (the Witcher’s makers) have stated minimum requirements that are quite hefty:

OS: Windows 7 or 8.1

Processor: Intel Core i5-2500k 3.3 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 940

Memory: 6GB

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660

With this kind of hardware, you’ll be able to play the Witcher 3 at low or medium levels at best. In order to crank up all the details at Full HD, you’re going to need a rig with a far more powerful GPU and more memory:

OS: Windows 7 or 8.1

Processor: Intel Core i7 3770 3.4 GHz or AMD FX-8350 4.0 GHZ

Memory: 16GB

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 970 GTX

This is what I’m using and the machine just about manages to produce 50-60fps (frames per second). But no matter whether you got the lower specs or a high-end gaming PC, we’ll show you how to get the highest quality and much smoother framerates.

 

#1 – Performance 101: 9 Tweaks to Optimize Your PCs and Laptops Performance

Before you start tweaking performance settings for The Witcher 3, I recommend that you follow the 9 essential steps to boost your PC or laptop speed that I published a while ago. This covers the basic steps to get your machine in top shape, including how to:

  • Upgrade your graphics drivers and even use beta drivers
  • Overclock your graphics card (safely!)
  • Use our AVG PC TuneUp to turn off all performance-sapping background activity
  • Defrag your hard disk
  • …and more!

As The Witcher 3 takes its toll on your hardware, you got to be sure that it’s tweaked to its absolute limit before you jump into the game-specific settings.

 

#2 – Get the NVIDIA & AMD THE WITCHER 3 Drivers

As usual, NVIDIA have prepared a special driver optimized for The Witcher and enables dual GPUs and HairWorks as well as the best possible performance.

 

#3 – Use SweetFX to Make The Game Look Gorgeous

The SweetFX tools have long been the first steps to making games look far more beautiful by adding various filters and graphic effects like sharpening and bloom or different anti-aliasing techniques. The thing is: SweetFX simply enables graphical modification, but there are dozens of great different profiles from users from around the world. The ones I’ve tried and can recommend are the following:

Sweetfx

 

This video should help you get a great understanding of how the various SweetFX settings work.

Video

Witcher Three SweetFX

#3 – Tweak The Graphic Settings

The in-game settings in The Witcher 3 are very straightforward: You’ll find them both under the Options menu and Post-Processing and Graphics. You can chose between presets ranging from Low to Ultra and you should find the ones that really match your computers performance:

Witcher 3 Menu

What I would recommend here is turning off Sharpening or setting it to Low as the Highest setting makes everything look just a bit too crisp and unnatural. The slightly blurry look adds to the immersion and also increases performance. If you’ve got a weaker PC, you should definitely turn off Anti-Aliasing and Ambient Occlusion, as these are the big performance eaters here.

Witcher 3 Menu

Moving to the Graphics setting, here are some interesting tweaks that made The Witcher 3 run smoother on my gaming PC: First, I switched from Full Screen to Borderless Window. Curiously, that reduced a significant lag when playing The Witcher 3.

The other bit that helped me was turning off Hardware Cursor. Other than that, it’s the usual deal: if the game stutters, try turning down settings one by one. The ones that don’t make everything look awful and still get you a few more fps are Grass Density, Water Quality, and Shadows.

Start lowering these settings first before you lower settings with a more visible effect such as Detail Level or Texture Quality or otherwise your game won’t look as gorgeous as this:

Witcher 3 Graphics

Other than that, a few words on the other options that could help you squeeze out more performance:

  • Ambient Occlusion: HBAO+ should be enabled as it adds better shading and lighting effects to any scene at not too high of performance cost. If you’re really struggling with low frames per second, you should try the less taxing SSAO technique before turning it off (which really impacts the visuals). This comparison video will help you get a sense of the impact:

Video

Witcher 3: Ambient occlusion

 

  • HairWorks: Hairworks is a NVIDIA specific technique that makes hair on both the protagonist Geralt and monsters look fantastic. If you don’t care about having every single strain of hair perfectly animated, you can save a ton of performance by turning it off.
  • Grass density: Even on my rather powerful gaming PC, turning off grass density had a noticeable effect on smoothness in some scenes.

 

#4 – Boost Your Visuals with These 5 Hidden Tweaks

Got your Witcher 3 maxed out and it’s still super-smooth? Then let’s try a few hidden tweaks that’ll make The Witcher 3 look even more gorgeous than before. However, you need to do a bit of fiddling: First, you need to make sure that your in-game settings are perfectly tweaked (you’ll soon know why).

First, go to your user folder under “C:UsersUSERNAMEDocumentsThe Witcher 3”. Make a copy of the file “user.settings” and open it up with Notepad.

Witcher 3 Notepad

While a lot of these settings are still unexplained, users on the web have figured out the effect of some of these. First, jump to the line GrassDistanceScale and FoliageDistanceScale. This value defines the quality of every piece of nature you see on screen, such as grass, trees or bushes and the distance at which you can still see them.

If you go with the games Ultra setting, this setting will be at 1.5. If you’ve got a powerful rig, try cranking it up to 3 to get a noticeable improvement in The Witcher 3’s beautiful environment.

Witcher 3 Hairworks

Next, we recommend adding a new entry under the [Rendering] section called HairWorksAALevel. This setting determines the level of anti-aliasing on hair on NVIDIA graphic cards. If you set this to 8, hair will render without jaggies or other strange artifacts at the cost of just a few frames per second.

Done with all the settings? Save the file! But here comes the important part: To prevent the game from changing the settings back to its default, you have to make the file ready-only. To do that, right-click on the user.settings file and select Properties. Check Ready-only and hit OK to write-protect it! Hint: In addition to that, AMDs support pages recommend setting the EnableTemporalAA setting from True to False on multi-GPU systems (AND CrossFire: More than one AMD/ATI card in one system).

 

#5 – Make Sure Your NVIDIA & AMD card is set up properly

If The Witcher 3 is stuttering when you’re roaming about in towns, there is a specific setting you have to make within your NVIDIA or AMD cards control panel:

  • NVIDIA: Go to Manage 3D settings and scroll to the Maximum Pre-rendered Frames.

Witcher 3 Pre render

 

  • Set this to 1 to reduce any stuttering.
  • AMD: Under Radeon Pro, create a new profile for The Witcher 3 and set the Flip Queue Size to 1.

We hope you can enjoy The Witcher 3 thanks to our gameplay tweaks and remember, these are only recommendations based on my own tests.

AVG

Are these the world’s greediest apps?

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On a typical business or vacation day, my phone barely makes it through the day: A bit of Googling here, a bit of research there, some email and gaming in between and before I know it, my battery life is down to 10% and it’s only 4pm!

It’s not necessarily my smartphone’s fault, but likely a consequence of the demanding apps that I run, often completely invisibly in the background. These apps drain not just battery life but also fill up my storage or cause a ton of mobile traffic.

Turns out, I’m not alone.

When looking at one million of our anonymous AVG AntiVirus and AVG Cleaner users, we discovered the most resource-hungry apps in the first quarter of 2015. Plus, we found the most-used apps in each category! Curious as to what’s new this quarter?

 

Key findings:

Dating & chatting apps surge into the Top 10

Android owners worldwide were trying to meet Mr or Mrs Right in the first three months of 2015. POF Free Dating entered the Top 10 and there was a new entrant at number six from the chat category, OoVoo Video & Text, which also had a noticeable impact on battery life.

 

Facebook Messenger is now the top communication app:

Facebook Messenger has previously been ranked as the third most popular communication app behind WhatsApp and Google Mail but has since overtaken them and now sits top of the pile.

Facebook Messenger

 

Samsung Knox, Samsung Push, and Beaming Service are the top battery drainers

Samsung’s KNOX security service drains the battery of your Galaxy smartphone invisibly in the background.

Knox

In addition, the built-in Samsung Push Service now also runs in the background and made it to 7th position. This service is required for ChatON, a WhatsApp rival that packaged with almost all of the company’s handsets. The good news for your batter is that Samsung turned it off on February 1st.

The top spot among battery draining apps is a background service called Beaming Service by Mobeam Inc., which also comes bundled with many Samsung phones.

Tip: See our all-new AVG Android Optimization Guide to identify and turn off such resource-hungry apps.

 

Cleaning and security apps that drain your phone

People looking to protect and clean their phone should know some of the top used apps, including Lookout Security & Antivirus and Clean Master, show up in the top spots on our lists of top battery drainers and traffic consuming apps. What’s interesting is that 88% of all measured apps in the traffic consumption category consume less traffic than Clean master, which clocked in at several hundred megabytes of data per user.

Clean Master

 

New gaming style on the rise: casino games start a new trend

In the first three months of 2015, we identified a massive spike in the use of card and casino games as well as big blockbuster arcade games.

While the casino category didn’t even exist previously due to its low usage, in the January to March period of 2015, it featured as up to 7% of usage, and arcade games also grew to 12% usage from 1.6% in the previous quarter. Solitaire and Zynga’s Livepoker stood out as particularly popular.

Conversely, we spent far less time playing casual, strategy, puzzle or family games. See graph below:

Usage Chart

Find a full list and all the data in our app report here.

 

So what are you supposed to do if you’ve got one or even many of our resource drainers installed? Our AVG Android Performance Guide will help you out with great tips to improve battery life and clean up space in no time!

For highlights from the report, check out the infographic below.

Android App Report Q1 2015

AVG

Dating, Chatting and the Weather: Are These the World’s Greediest Smartphone Apps?

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AMSTERDAM – May 18, 2015 – AVG Technologies, N.V. (NYSE: AVG), the online security company™ for 200 million active users, releases today its latest app performance report for January to March 2015. During the first three months of the year, AVG tracked a surge in dating and chatting apps including POF Free Dating, WeChat and ooVoo Video Call in the top social installs, top battery drainers and top data plan consumption lists. In addition, no less than four weather apps, such as Yahoo Weather and Weather Channel, also appeared for the first time, making the top 10 list of Android apps most likely to burn through your data allowance, while Weather & Clock Widget Android also appeared in the top battery drainers table.

The top findings from the report are:

  • Casino games topped the charts for most overall time spent per app: This quarter saw a massive spike in time spent on Card and Casino games as well as blockbuster Arcade games, with the likes of Solitaire and Zynga’s Livepoker entering the charts. On the flip side, we spent far less time playing casual, strategy, puzzle or family games.
  • Dating app enters Top 10 installed social apps: With Valentine’s Day falling within this quarter, it’s no surprise a free dating app, POF Free Dating, entered the Top 10 most installed apps.
  • Chat apps are still the greediest apps: Mirroring previous reports, social media and chat apps continue to rank as the greediest Android apps, with Facebook, BBM, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WeChat accounting for five of the top six most resource-hungry ‘auto-running’ apps.

 

With the host of new apps entering the charts for popularity and impact on our smartphones, AVG broke down the top 10 overall impact findings to identify impact differences between apps which require the user to initiate them and apps that auto-run all the time.

 

Autorun                                   User Run

# Name # Name
1 Facebook 1 Spotify Music
2 BBM 2 Amazon Kindle
3 8 Ball Pool 3 LINE: Free Calls & Messages
4 Instagram 4 Samsung WatchON (Video)
5 Messenger 5 Snapchat
6 WeChat 6 Netflix
7 Facebook Pages Manager 7 SoundCloud – Music & Audio
8 ooVoo Video Call Text & Voice 8 Clean Master (Speed Booster)
9 KakaoTalk: Free Calls & Text 9 Tumblr
10 Vine 10 PicsArt Photo Studio

 

  • Silent smartphone sapping apps: Facebook kept its top slot in the list for apps that drain phone resources, but a more surprising entrant was the 2D game, 8 Ball Pool, which wouldn’t seem necessary to register as a startup app and run constantly in the background.
  • Start up and drain down: although users may choose to start these apps, they may not be aware of the potential impact of using them. For example, Spotify allows 3,333 songs to be stored locally which can eat up storage, while its data-heavy music and video service can drain your data plan allowance. Many of the other apps in this category are also content-heavy and should be used with care.

 

“Many of us take every day practical apps like weather and chat for granted and despite spending little time on them, the impact on our devices is actually quite significant,” said Tony Anscombe, Senior Security Evangelist, AVG Technologies. “A number of unexpected apps such as these are consuming battery, storage, and data traffic without users knowledge – and, in many cases, for no good reason. So if you’re wondering why you’re not getting the best performance out of your device, this could well be why.”

Analyzing aggregated, anonymous data from over one million AVG Android app users, the quarterly AVG Android App Performance Report aims to reveal the top performance-affecting apps worldwide – analyzing their overall impact and performance against three key categories – battery drain, storage consumption, and data traffic use.

The full report, which breaks down the performance impact further according to battery drain, storage consumption and data traffic, can be downloaded from AVG Now.