3 ms·

Big budget video games sometimes have Denuvo. I'm not 100% sure of how it works, but it's sometimes nasty enough to have a noticeable performance impact, even o

Big budget video games sometimes have Denuvo. I'm not 100% sure of how it works, but it's sometimes nasty enough to have a noticeable performance impact, even on high-end PCs. This is another example of pirates providing a better product.

kabdib 5y ago
I believe the "sometimes Denuvo impacts performance" problems are related to developers putting DRM checks in places they shouldn't (e.g., checking something every frame). I can't tell you the number of times that titles have been released with howlers like "check online friend status every 60th of a second" (via a REST request). Use of Denuvo would likely follow that . . . pattern.
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  IIRC, Denuvo isn't added by the game devs, they ship off their code (or compiled binaries?) to Denuvo who implement it for them.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    The way Denuvo work is they absolutely litter your code with checks that are exceedingly complex and convoluted. When they make a promise to the developers that "this game won't be cracked for X days/weeks" what they are saying is they are putting in so much extra code that it will take the crackers that much time to reverse engineer it. It's basically "we are adding this much busywork to your game". When some AAA publisher opts for the longest possible length it turns into a performance impacting amount of busywork. I wish more game companies would then ship the un-denuvoed version once the main version was cracked and released on pirate sites. Just do it quietly in a patch with a bullet point of " * slightly improved performance".
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Their product is most effective at preventing crackers from breaking the DRM when it is used in several places, since crackers would need to remove every call to crack the game. I've never seen a contract for Denuvo, but I've seen enough similar ones to extrapolate a bit. I suspect that it contains some provision to guarantee a certain number of days before a crack is released. If that's the case, it would make sense that they would stipulate/strongly recommend that checks be littered throughout the codebase, triggered by pre-defined operations. And I could see developers putting some of these operations in the core gameplay loop, not foreseeing the requirement to run a DRM check each time it is triggered. Plus, it's usually patched out after a certain number of days, so there's probably not too much incentive to worry too much about performance. Not apologizing for crappy behavior, but I can understand how it happens.
LeoPanthera 5y ago
Denuvo, which only works on Windows, lives in the kernel and is essentially a "benign" rootkit. Sometimes it's not very benign, there has been more than one example of a game with noticeably improved performance once cracked to remove it.

kabdib 5y ago

I believe the "sometimes Denuvo impacts performance" problems are related to developers putting DRM checks in places they shouldn't (e.g., checking something every frame). I can't tell you the number of times that titles have been released with howlers like "check online friend status every 60th of a second" (via a REST request). Use of Denuvo would likely follow that . . . pattern.

HideousKojima 5y ago
IIRC, Denuvo isn't added by the game devs, they ship off their code (or compiled binaries?) to Denuvo who implement it for them.
- jandrese 5y ago
  The way Denuvo work is they absolutely litter your code with checks that are exceedingly complex and convoluted. When they make a promise to the developers that "this game won't be cracked for X days/weeks" what they are saying is they are putting in so much extra code that it will take the crackers that much time to reverse engineer it. It's basically "we are adding this much busywork to your game". When some AAA publisher opts for the longest possible length it turns into a performance impacting amount of busywork. I wish more game companies would then ship the un-denuvoed version once the main version was cracked and released on pirate sites. Just do it quietly in a patch with a bullet point of " * slightly improved performance".
mywittyname 5y ago
Their product is most effective at preventing crackers from breaking the DRM when it is used in several places, since crackers would need to remove every call to crack the game. I've never seen a contract for Denuvo, but I've seen enough similar ones to extrapolate a bit. I suspect that it contains some provision to guarantee a certain number of days before a crack is released. If that's the case, it would make sense that they would stipulate/strongly recommend that checks be littered throughout the codebase, triggered by pre-defined operations. And I could see developers putting some of these operations in the core gameplay loop, not foreseeing the requirement to run a DRM check each time it is triggered. Plus, it's usually patched out after a certain number of days, so there's probably not too much incentive to worry too much about performance. Not apologizing for crappy behavior, but I can understand how it happens.

LeoPanthera 5y ago

Denuvo, which only works on Windows, lives in the kernel and is essentially a "benign" rootkit. Sometimes it's not very benign, there has been more than one example of a game with noticeably improved performance once cracked to remove it.