Denuvo vows to prove that its DRM tech doesn’t impact game performance, once and for all
The maker of controversial anti-tamper software Denuvo has vowed to show that its much-maligned DRM doesn’t hurt game performance, finally putting to bed years of complaints that stopping piracy comes at the cost of legit players’ experience.
Denuvo, of course, is the name of the popular anti-piracy measure used by a number of major PC games and publishers - examples from this year including Company of Heroes 3 through to Dead Space and Dead Island 2.
As popular as it is with big publishers, it’s inversely unpopular with players, having earned a long-held reputation for impacting the performance of games on PC. In particular, tests by YouTube channel Overlord Gaming in 2018 indicated that Denuvo might increase loading times by up to 80 percent, as well as impacting the framerate of some games.
The suggestion that Denuvo might impact performance led in part to some publishers pulling the anti-tamper software out of their games, with the likes of Doom Eternal, Dishonored 2 and Inside all dropping the DRM after launch. Perhaps most infamously, Resident Evil Village was found to run significantly better using a crack that removed Denuvo, leading publisher Capcom to remove the DRM software from the official release earlier this year.
However, it’s not quite so clear-cut, as other tests have suggested that removing Denuvo offers no improvement to performance - or, at least, that any performance hit might be down to publishers’ in-house DRM and other factors rather than Denuvo specifically.
Basically, there hasn’t really been a definitive answer to whether using Denuvo hurts game performance, but it’s nevertheless remained a common criticism of the DRM regardless - and now it’s a score that its own maker wants to
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