Gotta love DRM that makes paid versions of games worse than pirated stuff.

  • 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.

    • 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.

        • 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.

              • 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+.

    • 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.