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Submitted via IRC for takyon

Evidence continues to mount about how bad Denuvo is for PC gaming performance

One of the biggest arguments against anti-piracy checks built into video games (commonly known as "digital rights management," or DRM) is that they punish paying customers with stuttering, loading times, and other detractive gameplay issues. While leading DRM vendor Denuvo has long claimed that its tools don't hamper video games, the stats keep piling up to suggest otherwise.

This week, in its third video on the topic, YouTube channel Overlord Gaming confirmed an additional six examples of improvements once Denuvo was patched out of recent games. The differences in performance range from marginal to noticeable. Yet in all cases, Overlord confirms a general trend of Denuvo impact in two key categories: loading times, and sporadic-yet-severe spikes in "frame time."

The latter issue emerges when a system struggles to render the next frame of animation in a video game, resulting in a pause far greater than the 16.67-millisecond standard found in "60 frames per second" action. Overlord Gaming once again found frame time spikes in the 100-, 200-, and even 400-millisecond ranges in every tested game that had Denuvo enabled. These rare-but-severe dips subsequently went away in each game's post-Denuvo version.

All six tested games included loading times that were anywhere between 50-80 percent longer with Denuvo enabled. Overlord's tests made sure to reload and retest both pre- and post-Denuvo versions a few times, to see how leaving any information or assets in a system's RAM might affect subsequent reboots, and to confirm that post-Denuvo versions weren't unfairly benefiting from game elements remaining in the testing system.

It is important to note that for a long time, after cracks, developers remove Denuvo DRM from their games, which seems to imply that they know full well it hinders game performance.

Original Submission