Personal comparison of anti virus programs, from post to post, are irrelevant . The success or failure is totally related to the types of pages visited. For example, in my own case, I am not a game player, nor do I download pirated material.
For many years, back in 286/386 days, I ran without any protection. Since then, with more sophisticated infiltration methods and, more to the point, infringment of security and personal data, I have , over the past years, started to use anit virus measures. But, before and after, I have never, to my knowledge, picked up a virus.
In the family I have a son who blatantly downloads bad material and visits many doubtful sites. In particular, this includes the many "hacking" sites for illegal serial numbers/patches. The latter are guaranteed to plant a virus on your computer. My son regularly has to clean his computer, in spite of having paid up preventative software.
As for the various "benchmarks". The above arguments apply to those as well but, more to the point, if you browse, you will find that the order of the lists often changes dramatically from 6 month to 6 month. I do not know the background of obtaining the updated "definitions", but I would suspect they mostly come from the same source. Effectively, this means that, from the point of view of detection, they are all apllying the same criteria and information. With this in my mind, I tend to look for 1. Free and 2. Unobtrusive. I find that MSE is fulfilling both of these requirements.