6 ms·
I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly
by lousken 5mo ago
I would hope publishers would take note and remove it, having hundreds of megabytes of junk in the executable is just wasteful to put it mildly
- Kuraj 5mo agoThe bigger problem with Denuvo is that it appears to significantly impact game performance as well
- delecti 5mo agoIt can, but that seems to be more related to poor implementations by the game devs, and not inherent to it. There are plenty of examples of games with Denuvo that still run fine (give or take your opinion on whether the presence of DRM is inherently "impacted performance").
- Ferret7446 5mo agoIf many of your users misuse your tool, that's a design problem not user error
- embedding-shape 5mo agoYeah, goddamn hammers needs to be way softer, do you know how many thumbs worldwide have been hurt by them? Clearly the fault of the hammer.
- c0balt 5mo agoIf I have you hammer with a wax coated handle then it will regularly slip out of your hand. One could blame the user for not "just" holding it right. Or alternatively reconsider if the handle should have a grippy coating instead.
- consp 5mo agoMore modern version: No you are holding your iPhone wrong, it is not a design fault that makes a ground loop in the antenna if you hold two metal surfaces with your hands.
- delecti 5mo agoThere's a valid point there, but that's stating it way too strongly. I haven't seen their documentation, maybe the problem lies there. But there's no tool or documentation so perfect that nobody can use it wrong.
- KennyBlanken 5mo agoThe games run terribly on release because they have Denuvo, and then when the sales volume no longer justifies the licensing costs of Denuvo, the devs strip it out and sell it to the players in patch notes as "optimizing performance." Someone else mentioned GTA getting more aggressive copy protection out of nowhere. It's not out of nowhere. With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection. Denuvo has layers upon layers of obfuscation that inflates nearly every instruction and function call, extra code execution that does nothing to throw off someone trying to follow code execution paths, and constant moving around where the game stores stuff in memory, again, to throw someone off watching via debugger. It's pathetic because one company has been almost entirely responsible for people needing to buy faster and faster CPUs and GPUs trying to eek out more and more performance. CPUs, GPUs, memory - all of it has gotten enormously faster, we have more cores, etc. Despite all that, every new game barely runs at 60fps. Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
- sabas123 5mo ago> Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not. If you strictly want to blame Denuvo then that assumes game developers cannot think of a way to spend their extra performance either. Which is obviously not the case.
- consp 5mo agoI would assume the cache misses alone will destroy any performance.
- dns_snek 5mo ago> With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection How does that justify it? Adding stronger DRM when cracked copies of the same content are already out there is like trying to get insurance after your house has already burnt down.
- protimewaster 5mo agoIsn't Denuvo actually implemented in a game by the DRM developers, though? I remember reading that they have a process where the game dev sends Denuvo an unprotected executable, who adds the DRM to that executable and sends it back. Thus, I believe the poor implementations are directly the fault of Denuvo.
- Pay08 5mo agoI think that used to be the case years ago but isn't anymore.
- Mindwipe 5mo agoThe evidence for this supposed performance hit is basically zero.
- shooly 5mo agoFalse. There's lots of side-by-side recordings of Denuvo and non-Denuvo versions of games on YouTube clearly showing that Denuvo does impact performance.
- Mindwipe 5mo agoNo there aren't, because having identical builds of games with Denuvo actually removed and present is vanishingly rare. If you compare a game that's had significant performance patches over a period of years and had Denuvo removed to the launch version (as so many of these videos are) then no shit you see performance differences, but it doesn't tell you anything.
- dns_snek 5mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07NMuobVVwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07NMuobVVwQ This channel has many comparison videos like this one. Loading times and 1% or 0.1% low FPS are usually hit the hardest and those stutters are the most immersion-breaking.
- akimbostrawman 5mo agoShould be noted that even scene cracks don't fully remove denuvo and all the performance intense checks so the impact should be even larger on actually denuvo free versions.
- figmert 5mo agoWhy would they care for a few hundred MBs when the games are in the 10s of GBs?
- akiselev 5mo agoCPU cache space for code is much smaller than GPU memory for models (and the former is more important for performance since many CPU operations like pipeline parallelism are latency bound, not compute bound).
- lousken 5mo agoThis. Why spend extra on x3d cpu when you can have a reasonable game size (not that it has large enough cache anyway)
- joe_mamba 5mo ago>This. Why spend extra on x3d cpu when you can have a reasonable game size (not that it has large enough cache anyway) Because game(SW) devs/publishers don't care about spending money to optimize for reasonable size, and the enthusiast gamers want to play the game either way and will gladly fork out the cash for the HW to play it, if anything for the bragging rights. Remember "will it run Crysis?" vintage 2007? Yeah, enthusiasts will be enthusiasts. I'm a fan of the free market here. Badly optimized games will hurt their sales and force the studios to change or go bust, if the market decides so.
- lousken 5mo agoThat was not enough because of DRM junk though
- philistine 5mo agoDenuvo is there to prevent piracy within the first 90 days of release. Something like 60 to 80% of a game’s revenue is during that period. They don’t care that it’s eventually cracked, and they absolutely do not care about performance.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> Denuvo is there to prevent piracy within the first 90 days of release [...] They don’t care that it’s eventually cracked Ah, so Denuvo is always removed after ~90 days after release, as there is no point for them to keep it there?
- NicuCalcea 5mo agoDenuvo is sold as a subscription to developers, and it is often removed 6–12 months after release.
- lousken 5mo agoDenuvo should charge more for every month extra since the release
- akimbostrawman 5mo ago>often removed 6–12 months after release that's not true. Only denuvo after ~2020 is subscription based and the contracts usually are between 2-4 years.
- NicuCalcea 5mo ago- Devil May Cry 5: released March 2019, Denuvo removed February 2020 - Forspoken: released January 2023, Denuvo removed July 2023 - Final Fantasy XVI: released September 2024, Denuvo removed March 2024 - Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster: released September 2024, Denuvo removed September 2025 These are just a few examples, there are many more. I can't say whether it was removed because the contract ran out or another reason, but, as I said, Denuvo demonstrably is often removed 6–12 months after PC release.
- jojobas 5mo agoRemove DRM and let buyers suffer less? Crazy talk.
- socalgal2 5mo agoI would hope that users would just refuse to buy games that use Denuvo and similar malware. I do, but I know most users don't care.