Resident Evil 8 Village is quite a graphically demanding game, and especially if it is intended to be played at high resolutions and / or with maximum graphics settings. However, as we saw once the game was cracked, this is not the case when removing the DRM that Denuvo imposed on the equation.
Performance of Resident Evil 8 Villaje with and without Denuvo DRM
The test was carried out with a PC that today could be described as a mid-range gaming PC, which after all, as you may know, is the best-selling range of equipment and therefore the one that has the greatest number. users. . It consists of a processor Intel Core i7-7700 4-core and 8-thread process accompanied by NVIDIA GeForce 6 GB GTX 1060 GDDR5, a computer that generally shouldn’t have a problem running any title in Full HD resolution, which is precisely the resolution they tested at; all other graphics settings have been set to “Balanced”.
The main problem is that Denuvo DRM is constantly trying to verify that the running copy of the game is legal, and that is why when this verification is done, some effects of stuttering, something that is very visible in less powerful equipment.
In testing, the legal version of Resident Evil 8 Village with Denuvo DRM was only 6.2 FPS minimum, while the cracked version did not drop below 51 FPS, i.e. ‘there is a difference of 44.9 FPS between the two and this represents an increase of more than 8 times. If we take the average total FPS during the test, the original version offers 51.1 FPS against 65 FPS of the hacked version, which is a 13.9 FPS increase simply by eliminating the anti-piracy system and, in addition, without stuttering effects.
“This game uses Denuvo v11 + Capcom Anti-Tamper v3. The first problem is that Denuvo v11 has very important changes compared to v10, to which is added that Capcom’s DRM is integrated in the Denuvo VM and one of its tasks is to verify the integrity of the Denuvo code and his in key moments. If the verification fails, it will cause an in-game trigger which may occur after around 10 minutes of play or in some specific scenes ”.- said the group who managed to break the game.
Why do you think that every time you kill a zombie in the game there is a little “boost” that is especially felt on older processors? Because Capcom decided to put one of its obfuscated and heavy verification loops on the Denuvo VM, which takes a lot of CPU time to run.
Anti-piracy systems and their weight in performance
In the past, we’ve seen that Denuvo’s DRM carries a lot of weight in PC performance, and especially in those that are “fair” in terms of technical specs, so this test in Resident Evil 8 Village was never done. that further confirmation, although it is true that so far we have not seen such a noticeable difference.
The desire of companies to prevent their games from being pirated is quite normal, since they obviously want anyone who intends to play their games to have to buy them and not be able to get them for free, but it also seems pretty obvious that the Denuvo’s anti-hacking systems are not an optimal solution, on the one hand because they already have 11 versions and all 11 have proven to be totally ineffective since their games always end up being hacked, and on the other hand because ‘they have an impact on performance which has already reached an extremely remarkable point.
Should they do without anti-piracy systems? It’s one way of looking at it, and GOG has shown it with their games, all DRM-free and unrestricted. Ultimately, the solution may be to sell your games for a fair price and make them appealing to the user instead of investing huge amounts of money and time in something that turned out not to be. only useless, but also counterproductive.
