this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
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I am not going to say that I think Denuvo is good for gaming. I fully accept the importance of DRM for week one sales (which make a huge difference to publishers) and understand that activation models are incredibly useful for that but I also think activation model DRM is fundamentally shite because it renders games unplayable in order "Why is this random ass server plugged in in this closet?".
But I do think people overly attribute negative performance to denuvo. Implemented correctly, there are MAYBE a few checks per hour and that is system noise. The problem is that, for whatever reason, so many games end up adding the denuvo checks to critical path operations that either completely delay the loading of a new area or tank performance completely because it is checking a dozen times per minute. And that is 100% on Denuvo for not working properly with the studios they license their tools to.
But for the ones who DO implement it sanely? It is barely noticeable to the end user... from a performance standpoint.
Remember kids: Hate mother fuckers for what they actually do. Rather than going the "bitch eating crackers" route.
Regarding performance implications: I believe Denuvo DRM runs through a type of virtual machine environment. While this theoretically should be relatively transparent, there are definitely documented instances of it negatively impacting performance, sometimes severely. Maybe the VM it runs in is just bad with certain instructions/calls on certain CPU's or api's, hard to tell for sure. But it's not nothing.
Basiaclly all DRM models have had variations of that problem. It, again, boils down to what the check is, when they do it, and how often they do it.
For example:
And Denuvo is kind of the worst of all worlds since it is an activation model which, potentially, involves phoning home to a server.
To my knowledge, every single case of "Denuvo killed performance in mah gerhms!!" was either
I am not aware of anything that was fundamentally denuvo itself. I would love to know more if you can point to a documented example but everything I have seen that actually has numbers ends up being one of the above.
You seem to be arguing it's all about the implementation of the phoning home itself- I'm arguing that running the entire executable/binary through a virtual environment likely has far more drastic performance implications than a phone home, regardless of frequency. It probably IS mostly an implementation problem, but I'm more inclined to believe that the implementation of the Denuvo virtual environment is at fault, not just a server call and response delay. **EDIT: Apologies, forgot to include a link- see HERE. Looks like a substantial/measurable difference. Not massive, as measured here, but certainly enough that if your hardware is just barely able to run a game it could easily make or break the entire experience.