8 ms·
Why can DRM crash some games on 12th gen Intel core processors?
- lousken 5y agoThis fix is absolutely ridiculous, it should be in the publishers interest to remove the DRM on such games. And they also fully deserve to get bombarded with negative reviews until they do so Shipping a broken product to a paying customer should be absolutely unacceptable regardless of the industry
- judge2020 5y agoIt's more in the publisher's interest to prevent someone from creating a torrent with the files and anyone being able to use them to play the game without paying. The nature of DRM and this sentiment is exactly why online games are so lucrative - no DRM, besides anti-cheat, and microtransactions end up making way more money over the long-run if it's successful.
- lousken 5y agoExcept that enough studies have shown already that piracy doesn't hurt sales. And I'd add my point myself - it's the decisions of companies that do hurt them - whether is releasing a broken product, limiting something to a particular country or TV channel (like the olympics) etc. Piracy is not at fault, it's just that you provide inferiour product (or straight up no product at all)
- judge2020 5y agoIn its current state, sure, piracy doesn’t detract from sales; but if copying was legitimately as simple as sharing the game files, and there was a website that hosted all these games, then consumers would have the choice of “pay on day one” or “get the game free on day one”/“split the cost of the game 15 ways between your friend group” and i can assure you we’d see a steep decline in sales for single-player games. It should be noted that the primary goal of game studios isn’t to create a great product, nor to create a product that everyone can play - its to achieve the highest return on capital investment, and that usually involves only supporting the biggest OS (windows) and not appealing to players looking specifically for DRM-free games.
- lousken 5y agoMost games these days still use Steam DRM which is cracked on the first day, and games like cyberpunk were downloadable just like you said. And while I don't have the data to back it up, I don't think cyberpunk sales were hurt by being able to copy game files, but by producing unfinished game. If you hear reviews saying how the game's glitchy and unfinished - would you still waste your time on it? Singleplayer usually age like fine wine anyway, so playing it 1 year later could just be worth it more
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoOkay, so that's actually less insane than the title suggested. They're using scroll lock to specifically toggle a compatibility mode, after enabling an option to make it do that.
- r721 5y agoPCMag story: https://www.pcmag.com/news/intel-these-50-plus-pc-games-are-incompatible-with-alder-lake-cpus-due https://www.pcmag.com/news/intel-these-50-plus-pc-games-are-... (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29123216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29123216)
- armada651 5y agoTitle is misleading, Intel is offering a fix that allows the user to disable E-cores on the fly by using their scroll-lock key. They're only offering a reference implementation though, it's up to the motherboard vendors to ship a BIOS update with this workaround.
- CoolGuySteve 5y agoSo Scroll Lock is the new Turbo button eh? Hello my old friend.
- judge2020 5y agoI wonder how it does this - does it check for the USB input, or does it check for scroll lock to be turned on (ie. LED 0x03)? If it were the latter, I could see a program turning on scroll lock for the user so it could be sure new threads are immediately put on p-cores and ensuring AVX512 is available[0]. 0: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core-i912900k-review-hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core...
- bonzini 5y agoIt's almost certainly a hack based on system management mode. Not sure how it does it, but SMM is even used to emulate the PS/2 keyboard interface (at I/O ports 0x60/0x61) when all you have is a USB keyboard. So it's likely that the chipset has some kind of "backdoor" to the USB controller that can be accessed from SMM.
- mitigating 5y agoHow is the title misleading? It links directly to intel and tells you that you can use the scroll lock to stop the crashes. If the title said "Enable scroll lock to disable e-cores" that doesn't tell you why you would need to do that.
- judge2020 5y agoIt's misleading in that, if you had an Alder Lake CPU right now, enabling scroll lock wouldn't do anything since no/very few MOBO vendors have shipped this BIOS update. Plus, it doesn't "fix" the crash, it's a workaround that hurts your CPU performance for that game (since, now, new background tasks will be scheduled on your p-cores). It's usually best not to editorialize titles anyways, and the title would still reference DRM systems if it were "Why Can Digital Rights Management (DRM) Crash Some Games on 12th Gen Intel Core Processors?"
- ineedasername 5y agoDRM strikes again. Is there any DRM system in use that isn't broken within a few weeks of the game's release? It's an honest question, I don't follow the piracy scene any more, but it used to be a pretty rapid turn around on cracks. If that's still the case, then DRM is still just hostile toward paying customers and a speedbump to pirates.
- svnpenn 5y agoLast I heard it was a crap shoot, with some in weeks and others years.
- AussieWog93 5y agoThis is what I heard too. When I brought up GP's exact point a while back, apparently it's quite common now for big releases to have DRM that lasts for 6+ months before being cracked. It's not like the "good ol' days" any more.
- fabianhjr 5y ago> Is there any DRM system in use that isn't broken within a few weeks of the game's release? They wished, most DRM gets cracked in a few days with a few infamous ones being broken on the day of release or before release. (Plus, you get better performance by cracking legit copies you own and now having to get cracks to play most non-recent DRM'd games at all)
- whatever1 5y ago
- akersten 5y agoCan anyone speculate what in the world is even tripping Denuvo up in this scenario? Is there a realistic threat model they add to their garbageware that tries to detect... multiple physical distinct CPUs on one system as an indicator that the game is pirated? What a weird check.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- r721 5y agoFrom PCMag story: "The errors occur because Denuvo’s DRM software will mistakenly think the so-called "Performance-cores" and "Efficiency-cores" (P-cores and E-cores) on the chip belong to two separate PCs, when in reality the two types of processing cores are running on the same Alder Lake processor. (This P-core/E-core design is a new trait of Intel's chips with Alder Lake.) “Once it detects that some portion of the load has been split between the P- and E-cores, it sees the new cores as a new license holder (a separate system), and force-quits the game to prevent what it believes is two PCs trying to play one game on the same key,” wrote PCMag reviewer Chris Stobing."
- willcipriano 5y agoDRM aside, a bios update to fix a software bug feels backwards to me.
- entire-name 5y agoI'd say it's less of a "BIOS update to fix a software bug" and more of a "BIOS update to provide control to the user to perform a workaround for a software bug whose fix requires at least two, but probably more, parties to rollout".
- fabianhjr 5y agoThe fix requires only one party to act: the publisher removing DRM which affects performance and compatibility without providing any benefit at all.
- jh86 5y agoThe DRM doesn’t provide any benefit… to you. It does benefit the developers and publishers. Often you can find out what (if any) DRM is used before you purchase. Check out GOG.com if you want to avoid DRM entirely.
- salawat 5y ago>The DRM doesn’t provide any benefit… to you. It does benefit the developers and publishers. That's cool. I don't run software on my machines, using my power, using my bandwidth, and hw resources to make publisher's/developer's lives easier. They want it? They can keep it.
- fabianhjr 5y ago> Check out GOG.com if you want to avoid DRM entirely. I already avoid most DRMs since they don't normally run on Wine/Proton. (As mentioned, cracks are available and are legal to use for compatibility and archival; though developing nor sharing them is, go figure. Recent document about such circumvention exemptions: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-10-28/pdf/2021-23311.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-10-28/pdf/2021-2...) The other thing is that I use mostly FOSS stuff so I don't normally have to worry about DRM breaking things or causing me issues.
- throw7 5y agoLot of hacker news is blaming Denuvo. I disagree. This just goes to show how Intel has failed at pre-grade school level of implementation and testing of processor design.
- minitoar 5y agoAh yes, fond memories from preschool: on the playground, hop scotch, instruction pipelines, plenty of physical registers to go around. Those were the days.
- CamperBob2 5y agoAnd the Squid Game screenwriters perk up and start taking notes...
- wmf 5y agoWhen it comes to heterogeneous cores there are no "right" answers. If all the cores returned identical CPUID information Denuvo would probably work... but the cores are not identical so that would be kind of lying. (Given Intel's historic attention to backwards compatibility I'm a little surprised they don't have a lowest common denominator CPUID spoofing mode.) But if the cores return accurate CPUID then Denuvo can see that the cores aren't the same.
- ivegotnoaccount 5y agoOn the other hand, even with CPUID spoofing, if a DRM wants to check that it's running environment is sane, it would not surprise me to see timing consistency checks (if huge spikes occur at some point of time, it may indicate the process is being tampered with. Or that the process got descheduled or there are big loads on the computer, but we're talking about softwares that tend to take the assumption tempering is going on when in doubt so...)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ggm 5y ago"after BIOS/firmware update, scroll lock can be used as a special enabler key to disable DRM" -which is a completely different thing: this reads as if all current PC owners simply have to do ScrollLock, on boot, right now, unmodified BIOS
- freeone3000 5y agoIt doesn't disable DRM, it changes the core scheduling algorithm.
- ggm 5y agoFine. About that specific bit, I was wrong. The point of substance was that a bios update has to be applied. The headline as written is misleading by omission
- croo 5y agoHow many games are we talking about here? Wouldn't it be easier to fix the bug in the DRM?
- Thorrez 5y agoYes, some games are being updated. But some games might no longer be getting updates. > A software fix has been identified by the vendor of the affected DRM software and is being rolled out. > Workaround steps for end-users to enable Legacy Game Compatibility Mode with affected games that have not received a software fix:
- david_allison 5y ago49 https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000088261/processors.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
- eurasiantiger 5y agoScroll lock is the new turbo.