Into resource-heavy gaming? Check out our gaming mode.

Nearly 30 years ago, in 1993, the first incarnation of the cult computer game Doom appeared. And it was thanks to it that the few (imagine!) home computer owners back then found out that the best way of protecting yourself from monsters is to use a shotgun and a chainsaw ).

Now, I was never big into gaming (there simply wasn’t enough time – far too busy:); however, occasionally, after a long day’s slog, colleagues and I would spend an hour or so as first-person shooters, hooked up together on our local network. I even recall Duke Nukem corporate championships – results tables in which would be discussed at lunch in the canteen, and even bets being made/taken as to who would win! Thus, gaming – it was never far away.

Meanwhile, our antivirus appeared – complete with pig squeal (turn on English subs – bottom-right of video) to give fright to even the most fearsome of cyber-monsters. The first three releases went just fine. Then came the fourth. It came with a great many new technologies against complex cyberthreats, but we hadn’t thought through the architecture well enough – and we didn’t test it sufficiently either. The main issue was the way it hogged resources, slowing down computers. And software generally back then – and gaming in particular – was becoming more and more resource-intensive by the day; the last thing anyone needed was antivirus bogarting processor and RAM too.

So we had to act fast. Which we did. And then just two years later we launched our legendary sixth version, which surpassed everyone on speed (also reliability and flexibility). And for the last 15 years our solutions have been among the very best on performance.

Alas, leopards are thought to never lose their spots. A short-term issue affecting computer performance turned into a myth – and it’s still believed by some today. Competitors were of course happy to see this myth grow… to mythical proportions; we weren’t.

But, what has any of this K memory-laning got to do with Doom? Well…

Not long ago the fifth version of Doom was released – Doom Eternal. And it’s resource-heavy. It’s especially resource-heavy when it is speedran. (For those non-gamers among you, speedrunning is where a video game is played all the way through as fast as possible. This is done competitively, with gamers recording or livestreaming their speedruns in competitions.) So we decided speedrunning would be a good way to stamp out any last vestiges of the myth about our kit being too resource-hungry. So we teamed up with European Speedrunner Assembly to put on a championship for the world’s fastest Doom Eternal speedrun – Break the Record: Live – on computers with our product installed on them.

Now, these speedrunners really push a computer to the limits – it needs a fast processor, tons of RAM, and a super video card specially for gaming. It also needs the cyberprotection to keep itself to itself – for the whole duration of a speedrun: the slightest freeze of the system could be fatal to a world championship bid. Enter our product with gaming mode, specially for high-octane gaming.

Not that the level of protection is in any way lowered with gaming mode on; it’s just that scheduled scans and updates aren’t ran, and also notifications aren’t shown.

So, seven of the world’s top speedrunners in the world played one of the most resource-intensive games in a 14-hour marathon speedrun-off! But would the antivirus be able to keep up, or rather – keep out of the way?

You can guess the answer, I guess ). It sure did! But not only that – it kept out of the way during the breaking of the new world record! Yep, the winner – Xiae, from the USA – speedran Doom the fastest anyone has ever done it, in one hour and eight minutes, which is 48 seconds faster than the previous world record (and around 20 times faster than a regular gamer’s speed).

Asked if Kaspersky Internet Security made any difference, Xiae said: ‘it made no difference at all’. Doesn’t sound much of a endorsement at first glance – but have another look: ‘it made no difference’ – that’s exactly what was needed: it didn’t slow down his game one bit! After all in the past, regarding antiviruses, he used to: ‘turn them off to keep them from churning up the CPU at important moments. In Doom Eternal, we hit CPU bottlenecks all the time, making every cycle count.’

PS: I recently found out that the flying head in the game is called Cacodemon, an evil spirit or demon. I also found out that, in the Middle Ages, Cacodemonomania was considered a medical condition where the sufferer was convinced he/she was possessed by demons. Well, all I’ll say is that our K-kit with gaming mode on won’t protect you from demons, but it will protect your computer from viruses, even when playing Doom Eternal at world-record-breaking speed!