It has nothing to do with the Denuvo.

Denuvo is awful, but there's never been proof of it affecting performance and this is just jumping into conclusions.

For Dishonoured 2?
Well, I think we can chalk that up to the stellar optimisation AAA games seem to be getting these days.

Just talking out of my butt here, but it may affect the performance if not implemented properly. It may have only been added about the time it first appeared on the page, so they might not have been able to make an efficient implementation.

I dunno about any affect on performance, but what I understood from my experience with Denuvo is that is definitely a DRM!

As others mentioned now it checks online for some sort of authentication with Denuvo servers.

As much as I want to say that it's ok to have Denuvo, I just can't. With an awful situation which happened just today with my copy of MGS V. It couldn't connect to the server for like 3 minutes, I clicked like 10 times "Retry" button until it finally reached servers and my game started.

So yeah, Denuvo is as bad as others online check activation 3rd party tools, a la RSC from Rockstart, uplay from Ubisoft and others.

One day I'll not be able to play this game on my PC ;( Guess I'll need a physical copy and a conosle for some reason to be able to play it.

So as in performance issues, I had none with MGS V it's pretty good optimized for all sorts of hardware, I tried on a system with 4Gb of RAM and HD5850 1GB of VRam with an HDD WD Green 5400 RPM and Phenom II x6 with high preset I could hit 60fps but I had slows in some scenes.
Now I have a 7970 GHz Edition 3Gb of VRam, 8 GB of RAM, an SSHD 7200RPM and same CPU runs flawlessly at everything maxed 60fps my monitor though is 900p.

But the thing that it needs an Online check just kills the game for me. And this is the last title with Denuvo I've bought, the DRM just doesn't do it for me. I really want to play a few titles like Doom or Deus Ex, maybe even Tomb Raider or Dishonored 2 but fuck them for implementing Denuvo in their games.

Yeah a small rant and experience with "antitamper" Denuvo

Yep, for Dishonoured2.
It definitely seems like it's more down to bad (or zero) optimisation.

https://www.twitch.tv/draqu_

Shows him playing & framerate is all over the place & having to play on lowest settings (except textures).

P.S. It'll contain spoilers of course, but for of us refusing to pay for DRM in our DRM in our games, watching someone play instead is best we can do ;)

It's a real shame. I'll still buy MGSV because it's an excellent game regardless of DRM, but that's the only Denuvo game I'd like to own.

Btw, only owning one game on steam (Batman Arkham City), that screenshot makes me feel a little sad.

Yeah I was half-counting on that happening ever since they announced developing in-house engine. Because that crap always happens when somebody gets the bright idea of developing new engine from the scratch as opposed to using one of the existing solutions.

Ultimately we won't be able to get an accurate/trustworthy idea of the performance hit until something with Denuvo gets a proper DRM-free release so that the two can be openly compared, however it's inevitable that there will be some degree of performance impact due to how it works (it's very similar to how SecuROM protects itself - unsurprising as it's made by the same people).

The extent will depend on each system and how demanding of the CPU a particular game is; the system will need to cater to the the extra overhead of Denuvo itself in addition to running the game itself- bad news for a slow/weak CPU and/or demanding game.

The developers of one of the games that uses Denuvo (it was Lords of the Fallen IIRC) said that they expected a ~5% performance hit to be incurred by Denuvo. This is in line with the figures that CDPR quoted for SecuROM on the retail version of The Witcher 2 and as we know from that the performance hit was far greater than expected on some systems - as much as 30%.


http://www.dorkly.com/post/65536/how-every-awful-video-game-thing-was-born

^ All this

5% is a lot considering it's just meant to be as anti-tampering/DRM, but 30% is fucking nuts & a half!

You are partially right, but It is code, it will depend of implementation, there's quite a few games that uses Denuvo and performs just fine.

Lords of the Fallen was unoptimized as hell, Denuvo wasn't the major problem with that game certainly (The not so special CI games + the mostly unknown Deck 13). Even the console versions of that game ran badly.

On the other hand, FIFA, Dragon Age Inquisition, Doom, MGSV, and others runs just fine, why is that? Implementation of the code, even if or qhen Denuvo affects the the overall performance negatively it will be negligible.

Again: Saying that Denuvo itself is the sole reason for >>>!!!*major*!!!<<< performance issues nowadays is just jumping into assumptions.

Of course, it probably won't be particularly noticeable with games that don't make heavy use of the CPU and are running on a much better CPU than is normally required. But on the other hand, weaker systems and more CPU-intensive games will be much more likely to be severely affected.

From what I understand of Denuvo it uses a kind of mini-VM along with on the fly decryption and other means to obfuscate what it's doing and prevent cracking attempts. There's no way that won't take a toll on performance, but as I said, the amount of performance hit will primarily depend on the system's CPU & how demanding of the CPU the game is.

How do you measure the impact of Denuvo on a weak system that is already unlikely to run the game well in the first place?

And again, we are talking about major performance hits allegedly attributed to Denuvo when even people with high end rigs are having issues with the games.

I still maintain that *if* it is indeed Denuvo that is causing the issues, the coding is borked.
Likely a feature of the game is directly tied to DRM itself which would be stupid beyond reason.

I think I'd just chalk it up to Devs not bothering, or even not being given time to optimise the games.

Using the Unreal Engine doesn't really save some games from performance issues, like Arkham Knight can attest, and Metal Gear Solid V has superb performance, and is made by a proprietary in-house game engine (the FOX Engine).

Even if the performance issues were a risk, I'd prefer them to never trying to innovate technically at all.

sad

I'm not talking about major performance hits being attributed to Denuvo in general, just that Denuvo will incur some degree of performance hit. Exactly how much we can't know for sure until we have at least one DRM-free release of a Denuvo game so that the two can be openly compared, like was done with The Witcher 2 (where there was a DRM-free GOG release to compare with the DRM'ed retail version). We can't trust what Denuvo say about it, nor what developers/publishers claim - they all have very strong motives to downplay any negative effects.

Still, we know that it uses similar methods as SecuROM did to protect itself from being cracked so it's reasonable to assume its performance impact will at least be comparable.


It's not necessarily bad programming in either case if Denuvo is the cause of poor performance with some games - Denuvo does do some very unusual things that in some cases may not interact well with the game's code & cause problems that can't easily be fixed.