PC gamers thoroughly dislike convoluted DRM checks such as Denovo. The primary reason being that it degrades game performance to a rather significant degree. The cracked (pirated) version of Resident Evil Village has now surfaced, allowing certain enterprising gamers to check just how much of a performance hit Denovo is responsible for in this title.
As per preliminary testing, the game runs significantly smoother without the DRM, with lows being up to 45 FPS higher than the Steam version. With the latter, the game drops to just 6 FPS in certain action-packed scenes, while the cracked version doesn’t dip below the 50 FPS mark!
The reason for this massive delta in performance is the use of Denovo v11 Anti-Tamper DRM that the game uses to prevent the unlawful distribution of the core files. The latest (v11) version of Denovo is said to have a significantly higher CPU overhead than previous implementations. If the DRM fails to verify the integrity of its anti-tamper code, it triggers a complex check loop that takes a fair bit of the CPU resources, especially on older systems, resulting in micro-stutters. This check is reportedly triggered every ten minutes which is why there are frequency FPS drops during gameplay.
While we haven’t been able to verify this, there are plenty of users reporting the same behavior, making it hard to ignore. This isn’t the first time Denovo has led to the deterioration of performance in a PC game, but this one is one of the most severe cases seen to date.
Via: ElChapuzas
