COO says coming benchmarks will show anti-piracy tech has no performance impact.
They do decryption and network calls during runtime. Computers are not magic, you cannot do additional processing, call on external resources and not have a performance impact. I will never trust when they say this, not once ever. They have a vested interest in convincing people of this even if it’s simply not possible.
Resident Evil Village was a good example of that. People tested the two versions, and the cracked one was significantly faster on all runs. Even media reported on it.
Capcom did not remove Denuvo due performance impacts. They released an update without it because the big bucks from selling the game happen early in the games lifespan, not year or two later.
Denuvo is a license model, so the longer game contains it, the longer the company needs to pay for the license.
It’s merely a cost savings removal, as happens with many games that contain Denuvo.
on a modern PC doing that is almost entirely trivial if implemented correctly, I hate DRM but to be honest they may be right that it has no appreciable effect on the final performance of the product for the vast majority of users. Of course that’s dependent on proper implementation, what are the odds these folks at Denuvo can do that? pretty low.
Activation limits and compatibility are the biggest issues for me.
Well… modern computers have crypto accelerating instructions, and games rarely use all the cores to their full potential, offloading as much as they can to the GPU instead, while network traffic is relatively minimal, so it is possible to run a lot of stuff on the same computer without impacting the performance of the game itself.
That doesn’t fix the rest of the problems, though.
Sure if the person’s PC is well beyond what is required they won’t notice it, but I’ve played on old and underpowered PCs with bad internet connections enough not to assume that there will be always plentiful resources to spare.
Fair point, but does Denuvo apply to games that run on underpowered PCs? I might be mistaken, but I thought Denuvo was only meant for the “AAA” titles that require top tier hardware anyway.
Then you’d get a degraded experience anyway, I don’t think the difference would be noticeable. Where it would be noticeable, would be with retro games on pretty old hardware.
Either way, even if it were to slow a game by 50%, that would still not be the biggest issue with Denuvo.
They do decryption and network calls during runtime. Computers are not magic, you cannot do additional processing, call on external resources and not have a performance impact. I will never trust when they say this, not once ever. They have a vested interest in convincing people of this even if it’s simply not possible.
Resident Evil Village was a good example of that. People tested the two versions, and the cracked one was significantly faster on all runs. Even media reported on it.
https://www.pcgamer.com/resident-evil-village-drm-denuvo-stuttering/
They even ended up removing denuvo from resident evil because of the performance issues
https://www.pcgamer.com/capcom-removes-denuvo-from-resident-evil-village/
Capcom did not remove Denuvo due performance impacts. They released an update without it because the big bucks from selling the game happen early in the games lifespan, not year or two later.
Denuvo is a license model, so the longer game contains it, the longer the company needs to pay for the license.
It’s merely a cost savings removal, as happens with many games that contain Denuvo.
on a modern PC doing that is almost entirely trivial if implemented correctly, I hate DRM but to be honest they may be right that it has no appreciable effect on the final performance of the product for the vast majority of users. Of course that’s dependent on proper implementation, what are the odds these folks at Denuvo can do that? pretty low.
Activation limits and compatibility are the biggest issues for me.
Well… modern computers have crypto accelerating instructions, and games rarely use all the cores to their full potential, offloading as much as they can to the GPU instead, while network traffic is relatively minimal, so it is possible to run a lot of stuff on the same computer without impacting the performance of the game itself.
That doesn’t fix the rest of the problems, though.
Sure if the person’s PC is well beyond what is required they won’t notice it, but I’ve played on old and underpowered PCs with bad internet connections enough not to assume that there will be always plentiful resources to spare.
Fair point, but does Denuvo apply to games that run on underpowered PCs? I might be mistaken, but I thought Denuvo was only meant for the “AAA” titles that require top tier hardware anyway.
What i you’re right at or below the “minimum requirements” for an AAA game? Should those people just not get to play?
Then you’d get a degraded experience anyway, I don’t think the difference would be noticeable. Where it would be noticeable, would be with retro games on pretty old hardware.
Either way, even if it were to slow a game by 50%, that would still not be the biggest issue with Denuvo.
One percent from ~ 45avg fps, especially the low drops, feel worse when there’s even more intermittent losses from DRM.
It’s harder to notice a few fps drop at 100+.