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Assassin's Creed Origins is crippling gamers' CPUs due to anti-piracy DRM
- baq 9y agowho is the customer if so extreme anti-end-user measures are taken, because it surely isn't the end user?
- RobLach 9y ago"Ubisoft has also implemented VMProtect, a piece of software that protects code by executing it on a virtual machine with non-standard architecture [...] tanking the game's performance by 30-40 per cent" This feels so extreme.
- bdz 9y agoHere is the post by the cracker https://image.prntscr.com/image/_6qmeqq0RBCMIAtGK8VnRw.png https://image.prntscr.com/image/_6qmeqq0RBCMIAtGK8VnRw.png https://np.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/79pd62/update_on_ubisofts_anticonsumerism/ https://np.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/79pd62/update_on...
- UnoriginalGuy 9y agoThat's circumstantial. People are blaming the DRM because the DRM simply exists; all the breakpoint proves is that VMProtect does what it says it does (decode sections of the game in the VM). It doesn't however prove that the DRM causes the stutter or performance issues, for all we know that could be a bug in the game's engine itself. Hopefully time and more data will tell us for sure either way. We aren't there yet, although no lack of proof will stop the tech media from reporting on it.
- bdz 9y agoThere is more reasonable technical theory but it's all speculation now >Anvil Next engine has been rewritten with a bindless model for shaders but their DX12 renderer that goes hand in hand with this tech is only ready on Xbox One. On PC this cannot be handled so they use an extra binding wrapper to communicate between D3D11 and their renderer, this was co developed by Intel and Ubisoft. This goes against what AMD and Nvidia recommends to developers, uses a lot of extra CPU power and render their cards' power useless in certain situations (e.g. city areas in Origins). http://developer2.download.nvidia.com/assets/gameworks/downloads/regular/GDC17/DX12CaseStudies_GDC2017_FINAL.pdf http://developer2.download.nvidia.com/assets/gameworks/downl... https://np.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/79qxxt/assassins_creed_origins_is_crippling_gamers_cpus/dp49ply/ https://np.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/79qxxt/assassins_cree...
- Simon_says 9y agoI'll wait for the cracked version, thanks.
- keldaris 9y agoOh, so the cracked version that inevitably comes out will actually have decent performance? Adorable. Can't wait. It's often been the case that pirated versions are objectively superior to the crippled originals, but I don't think I've ever seen a case as blatant as this.
- Eric_WVGG 9y agoIf this is true, then there will also be a measurable environmental impact to playing the game. reminded of the unexpected (or at least, in the early days, under-reported) energy costs associated with cryptocurrencies...
- glenndebacker 9y agoIt's mostly the paying customer who ends up with the burden. I would really like to know the train of thought behind it because for me that is just plain weird. It's the same when you buy a movie or a television show on DVD/BR. You first get the traditional FBI warnings (that as a non US citizen doesn't apply to me) and if you are lucky you get a 3 minute unskippable scenes about how piracy is the equivalent of murdering a thousand puppies. Somebody who pirates never see these things and have a better viewing experience.
- gatmne 9y agoThis is exactly why I pirate what I bought when I want to rewatch it. Torrents are superior in every way so those box sets usually sit on the shelves gathering dust. I don't know why media companies insist on punishing paying customers.
- mrguyorama 9y agoInvesting in new infrastructure and a changing market is more expensive than talking to a few Senators and buying off the shelf DRM solutions
- mbaha 9y agoLove how you just summed up (in my mind) the reasons for Netflix's success. Really glad that the market really played its role by providing customers with a near-perfect (Netflix's library is inconsistent to say the least) viewing experience.
- digitalshankar 9y agoLOL the cracked version removes this glitch. The irony that paid game is worse than free pirated.
- 42656e 9y agoThe point is that there isn't a cracked version (yet).
- reificator 9y agoBut when it comes out, those who don't pay will get a markedly better experience than those who do. And yet any high piracy numbers will be used to further justify invasive DRM like this, harming people like me who just want to pay for a game and not be punished for doing so. It's the most backwards assed system I can think of. Why do we as an industry still pretend DRM is worth a damn?
- dkersten 9y agoThis has commonly been the case with DRM'd games.
- wccrawford 9y agoYup. I've been steadfastly anti-DRM since I had a game that just crashed after a few minutes because it thought my SCSI CD-ROM drive was a virtual drive and the DRM kicked in. I ended up having to pirate it in addition to buying it in order to play it the first few weeks. They eventually released a patch, but by then I had been playing the game for weeks without another problem and there was no way I was risking their countermeasures. At the time, I was pissed that I spent my good money and they screwed me like that, and even denied the problem for weeks before fixing it.
- dkersten 9y agoI also remember having a terrible experience with games for windows live back in the day... it wouldn't let me play my legally purchased game without creating an account first. Problem was, there were problems creating the account! When I finally got it working somehow, it decided that games for windows live needed a 3 hour update first. I was never more furious at a game/drm before or since. Man I hated games for windows live, glad that shit is dead.
- ajuc 9y agoTalk by CD Projekt's CEO about not using DRM, and dealing with piracy: https://kotaku.com/some-real-talk-on-piracy-from-a-witcher-3-dev-1783864910 https://kotaku.com/some-real-talk-on-piracy-from-a-witcher-3... Their approach always made so much more sense to me.
- skocznymroczny 9y agoThey seem to be nice now, but during Witcher 2 release they had heavy DRM issues and threatened to go after pirates (while many of pirates were just people who wanted to play the game they bought).
- LeoNatan25 9y agoHuh? I bought The Witcher 2 on release day from GOG with no DRM.
- ajuc 9y agoPhysical copies in some countries had DRM because of publisher. There were problems, and they reacted to that poorly (threathening players who pirated). They apologised later.
- eat_veggies 9y agoI pirated the Witcher 3 originally, but it was so good I ended up buying it just to support the company. Step one in stopping piracy is to make something actually worth paying for.
- conanbatt 9y agoThe thing is that what you believe is worth paying for is proportional to the ease to find pirated content. In argentina, people pay netflix and share accounts between friends, and some play hbo go for GoT, but thats it. In the U.S., its very rate to see pirated TV. A sandwich might be worth 5 dollars to you, but if there are free sandwiches next to it, you will think "I would pay it if it were worth it"
- grabcocque 9y agoAccording to reliable source, The Inquirer, citing reliable source TorrentFreak.
- viraptor 9y agoI don't think I've read the inquirer articles before, but is this a standard? > EARLY ADOPTERS ... have been quick to moan that ... > ... gamers have taken to the Steam forums to whine about ... > DRM all too often seems to make users lives' a misery They're just talking about a broken game, right? (That will likely get patched in a few days/weeks)
- reificator 9y agoIt's more the batshit crazy idea behind it. If you want to play the game you have two choices: 1. Pay for the game to support the creation of more games. This path will include invasive DRM that either causes performance problems, damages your hardware, or disallows you from playing the game you paid for, for instance when you're not connected to the internet. 2. Pirate the game, play it how you want. That they punish the users who do the right thing and reward those who do not is crazy to me. That it has continued for so long without a collective wakeup call that you should not punish the people who give you money and play by the rules is mindboggling.
- LocalH 9y agoThere exists a third option. Pay for the game, then pirate the superior cracked version.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- reificator 9y agoWhich is still illegal regardless of whether it's moral. I'm trying to find a way to work in a bound for the floor reference but none of them fit.
- acoye 9y agoIt may works as a stopgap as this extreme move is not usualy found in games where performance is key to the experience. Hackers will develop better tooling for VM introspection or something in the near future dropping again the time between release and initial anti-drm patch. As a concerned consumer who buys game on pc or ps4, knowing this I will pass on the PC version and buy a second hand PS4 version. No way I'm upgrading my 3570k for the sake of a pointless virtualization overhead.
- fabian2k 9y agoWhile I wouldn't trust the source in this case, the very unusual CPU scaling and the very high CPU usage in general for this game could be explained by this. The game even benefits from Threadripper, scaling beyond 8 cores, which is very unusual for games. And as it also runs on consoles with much, much less CPU power, I would suspect it is doing something very inefficient on PCs.
- mschuster91 9y ago> And as it also runs on consoles with much, much less CPU power, I would suspect it is doing something very inefficient on PCs. Copy protection. PS4 and Xbox One are both AMD x64 so you can reuse loads of code, which means that TF is indeed correct in blaming DRM.
- dkersten 9y agoThis is why I don't buy games with DRM other than steams default DRM (although I mostly play games on PS4 nowadays anyway) and why I generally tend to avoid Ubisoft games (amongst others). I might buy a second hand copy at some point, or if its very heavily discounted, but I'm certainly not pushed to get this game, especially with this news.
- morganvachon 9y agoI wait until big games like the Witcher series hit GoG.com. That means I miss out on a ton of AAA games, but I'm not a hardcore gamer so it's no big deal. Most of my time gaming right now is split between catching up on late 2000s titles like the Crysis and Saint's Row series, and on open world games like Rust.
- seer 9y agoThe witcher is an exception though, as CDProject red are the creaters of both gog and the series, thus it was available from day 1 :)
- morganvachon 9y agoWow, I wasn't aware of that. What cemented GoG for me was two events: One, they got the entire classic Thief series (my all time favorite game series which won't install on modern Windows from my game discs) and two, when a few games on Steam that I thought I owned were pulled or otherwise tampered with; something I paid for was suddenly gone or altered with no recourse. I still have my Steam account and I do play games on it, but going forward all of my game budget goes to GoG and thrift store finds.
- dkersten 9y agoI love GoG! But as seer said, The Witcher is a special case, since GoG is owned by the same people. Still some fantastic games there though, just not the latest-and-greatest. (I also have a lot of Humble Bundle games)
- hashmal 9y ago
- jlebrech 9y agoI don't touch anything by ubisoft on pc due to being burned too many times, i don't want uplay.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Shivetya 9y agoodd, watching a few streamers with this and there were no indications as such from watching them play. now I do not know if they were given the game copies or merely codes so perhaps the DRM is not active for them. would be another can of worms if so
- robinduckett 9y agoI have a four year old gaming rig with minimal upgrades, i5-2600K, 24gb of RAM, GTX 760 iirc. I bet it will run like dogshite on my setup. YouTube streamers need to have decent machines in order to stream and play, so they may just have machines that are a lot more capable than the game itself can overcome
- bdz 9y agoLot of streamers use dual PC setup to lower the CPU stress. I watched a streamer with a single PC setup (playing + gaming on the same PC) and he had insane frame drops on a quite decent PC (i7-4790K + GTX 1080)
- JepZ 9y agoThe next version of Assassins Creed will probably only be available via on demand streams for the first month ;-)
- hd4 9y agoPublishers don't seem to have learned much since StarForce
- eps 9y agoThe fun fact time. Denuvo DRM happens to be... a repackaged VMProtect. Moreover VMP devs were suing Denuvo for illegally repackaging and selling a _single copy_ of VMP that Denuvo bought from them and then actively trying to evade paying licesning fees. Apparently prior to that Denuvo was talking to VMP about doing some custom development work, but they weren't able to agree on terms. [1] VMProtect itself is a well-established virtualization-based DRM solution and it does dramatically increase the complexity of cracking of binaries. It's been around for a while now and it's popular in shareware circles as a successor to Armadillo protector, which too was a form of a code virtualizer. From what I've seen said about VMP, it is stable and reasonably light, so Assassin's Creed maxing out CPUs is more likely the Creed's own problem rather that of the VMP. [1] https://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733344 https://rsdn.org/forum/shareware/6733344 (in Russian)
- maccard 9y agoAccording to VMProtect, that's not true [0] [0] http://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/ http://vmpsoft.com/20170606/vmprotect-and-denuvo-gmbh/
- eps 9y agoThey settled. The post I linked to is from March, when this circus was just getting started, and the post is by none other than the VMPSoft founder himself.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ionised 9y agoI remember when I bought Assassin's Creed 2 years ago (legitimate, legal copy from Steam) and the game would never connect to the authentication servers, no matter what I tried. I ended up having to download a cracked version of my legally owned game just to play it.
- polskibus 9y agoI wonder if they hijacked GPU a bit instead and used that for mining cryptocurrencies - whether Ubisoft would be better off (and deliver better experience to end user), instead of crippling CPU?
- Osiris 9y agoI've stopped gaming on PC and I only use Xbox One now. First, I can buy all my games digitally through a single store. I don't have to install Steam, Origin, Blizzard, etc. Second, I don't have to worry about installing DRM software that runs on my computer 24/7 even when I'm not gaming. Third, I can play in my living room instead of hunkered down in a dark room while my wife complains that I'm hiding from the family.
- beloch 9y agoUbisoft has a long history of using questionable DRM. I remember having problems uninstalling their Starforce crap after playing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones. If it's an Ubisoft game, it's worth paying attention when people complain about the DRM. It might not just be the pirates complaining.