Digital Foundry
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2024
11:03 · 197K views · Jul 14, 2021
Digital Foundry investigates why Resident Evil Village on PC runs worse with Capcom's Denuvo DRM than a cracked version. They benchmark and confirm performance and frame-pacing differences.
Cited as the evidence that Denuvo DRM measurably hurts game performance.
3 comments from Hacker News
The folks at Digital Foundry did a phenomenal job breaking down the specifics, as usual. I strongly suggest checking out their video if you're interested in the stuff: this video
> Well used, Denuvo is not that bad. Ubisoft admitting that Denuvo ( idk why they used the term third party lol ) causes PC stuttering. [LINK] Resident evil 8 runs better when it is stripped off its denuvo protection. As confirmed by Digital foundry's video. this video [LINK] You will now see a huge influx of video games being stripped of denuvo because it literally shits itself in 12th gen Intel chips and games become unplayable with denuvo. > And generally, it only serves to protect the first few months of sales, it is not uncommon to strip out DRM after that. Nope, disagree. The only time they strip Denuvo out is when the game is cracked by warez scenes or if the cost of paying denuvo gets bigger than the people actually paying for it. Some video games which are out for well over an year but just got denuvo removed in the last 2-3 months out of the blue. It is because of denuvos incompatibility with win11. 1.Shadow of Tomb Raider (3 years) 2.Rise of tomb raider (6 years ) 3.Injustice 2 (4years) 4.Jedi fallen order (2years ) 5.Nier replicant. 6. Tekken 7 (6years). > AAA games rely on advertising for that and run close to market saturation so pirate copies are more of an opportunity cost. Trust me when I say people who pirate are usually the ones who never ever buy video games. Pirates can never be considered an opportunity cost. Not trying to glorify pirates, but people waited patiently for over an year to play RDR2 till it got cracked, so that they don't have to pay outta the
DF's claims isn't that it doesn't have any noticeable effect in performance (in fact in a recent video[0] they claim the opposite when Denuvo was introduced to Assassin's Creed Mirage after reviews were done - it can affect performance and thus because of that introducing it after the fact invalidated the CPU performance metrics reviewers had done) but - at least in the cases i remember - they cannot tell if the issues were due to Denuvo or not. Note though that in a case where they could test both versions, they did find Denuvo to both have lesser performance and affect frame pacing[1] (though that is for a 2yo game, things might be better more recently). [0] [LINK] [1] this video