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Denuvo-Free Devil May Cry 5 Reportedly Improves the Game's Performance by Up to 20FPS
It appears that Denuvo's anti-tamper tech has significant impact on Devil May Cry 5's performance, and a Denuvo-free .exe game file has now surfaced online.
The Devil May Cry 5 .exe file was actually released by Capcom following the game's release earlier today, but has now been pulled. However, the file can still be downloaded through the Steam console. Several users are reporting FPS improvements by up to 20FPS while using the Denuvo-free exe file.
Sound familiar? Devil May Cry 5 is the game AMD demoed running on a Radeon VII GPU at its CES 2019 keynote. I wonder if they were running it with DRM.
Average frame rates are only part of the story when it comes to a game's performance. Minimum frame rates, percentiles, etc. can measure frame stuttering. A significant boost in a game's performance can also increase minimum frame rates.
Related:
Denuvo Forgets to Secure Server, Leaks Years of Messages From Game Makers
More Powerful Denuvo DRM Cracked 10 Days After Release of PREY
'Rime' Creators Will Remove Anti-Tampering Code If It's Cracked
New "Out of Control" Denuvo Piracy Protection Cracked
Denuvo License Generator is Latest Circumvention Method
Voksi Releases Detailed Denuvo-Cracking Video Tutorial
DRM Software Company Takes Legal Action Against Cracker
Hitman 2's Denuvo Protection Cracked Three Days Before Launch
New 'Valeroa' Anti-Piracy System Cracked "In 20 Minutes"
Evidence Continues to Mount About How Bad Denuvo is for PC Gaming Performance
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 09 2019, @10:17PM (6 children)
Have Intel issue CPUs with pins to a 2FA card slot you'd mount on the front panel like a floppy. Then have interested online publishers issue cards per-customer and deliver binaries signed and encrypted per-customer.
No performance loses. No closed source kernels and operating systems. No Management Engines. No Intel master key. No backdoors as long as you're not running encrypted binaries...
Good enough?
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(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @10:37PM
Oh cool I love replay attacks.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @10:53PM (4 children)
Nope.
An Intel-only "solution" would be a big "fsck you" to AMD owners.
Nobody's going allocate space for something comparable to a floppy drive in more compact computers.
People will lose the 2FA floppies. (Remember code wheels and other "something you have" protection chemes back in the day?)
Worst of all, it wouldn't be backward compatible with existing computers, turning its adoption into a chicken-and-egg situation. Nobody would be able to sell software that required the new floppy-dongle because nobody has a receptacle and there would be no incentive to replace perfectly functional computers just to play a game that won't work without a newfangled floppy-dongle.
You could turn around and claim you didn't mean an actual floppy-drive-like device, that a USB dongle would do, but the drawbacks wouldn't change: Intel-only alienates AMD owners; one more thing to lose; one more piece of hardware to fail (remember parallel- and serial-port dongles?); one more USB port lost to a mostly-useless device.
DRM is a loser's game. It punishes the customers and isn't a significant impediment to those who would engage in copyright infringement in the first place.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 09 2019, @11:52PM (3 children)
Who says it's an Intel only solution? They can open-spec the connector for all I care. AMD will have a different crypto and will workout the details with the publishers on issuing separate cards if necessary. They barely cost anything nowadays anyhow.
So they'll need to order a new one and redownload the game's binary.
What computer that fits a GPUs can't fit a card slot reader? And more importantly, the card I'm thinking about is less floppy, more SIM...
GPUs... CPUs... When was the last time a DRM enabled game run on anything older than a couple of years? Your whole premise dismisses the existence of consoles and their commercial success. Not only will the publishers adopt it. They'll reissue old games and find ways to upgrade old subscription just like they did with the XBOX.
Honestly dismissing this on technical grounds is pretty ridiculous... TV broadcasts are encrypted successfully using this model all over the globe. Intelligence agencies and corporations issue 2FAs for employees to access the company network on a regular basis... I might be wrong on a few details but this gets done all the time for much higher stakes than Call of Duty 3000: Nazis from Space.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:59PM
Why bother going physical at all? Just require a public key - download, use private key to decrypt, and go. Stopping unwanted sharing becomes relatively simple if you can incentivize people not to share their keys, which shouldn't be all that hard.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday March 11 2019, @01:49AM (1 child)
Not that I completely follow everything you said. But it sounds like you just want to give computers unique identifiers and have binaries onyl run on the one they are signed for.
We don't need special tech for this. We won;t seem sim cards for desktops. Just give the CPU a unique identifier. I imagine it already has one??
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday March 11 2019, @05:48PM
No. The card can't be used for identification since it's all done at the CPU level. You download an encrypted binary and stick it in the RAM. You then pass a pointer in a register and trigger machine code. The CPU then decrypts it with the card and isolates the memory region's access even from the OS. Even the binary doesn't have access to the decryption key. A user could listen in on the card-to-cpu lane with a physical man-in-the-middle. But it won't yield them anything than the specific session's token that's useless without the shared secret between the card and the CPU (manufacturer).
That's what it means by not hurting the customer: It doesn't hurt performance (after the initial decryption) and can't be used to invade their privacy. The publishers similarly don't know or need to know anything about the customer except a delivery address (could be a PO Box) for the card, a payment method (could be a debit card) and the associated user-account on their web site. The customer just logs in and download their encoded binary. No one else can use it. Even the customer can't use it without the card. And when the game is running, it has no means to identify who is running it no a need to. The fact it got decrypted is all the DRM anyone needs. More so, the user can give/gift/lend the game only with the card. The company may also want people to put in their online-account user name and password as a server-side assurance. But it's completely unnecessary even for multiplayer games so long as they don't screw up securing their client-server protocol.
Using CPU identifiers allows emulators to circumvent the DRM and will jeopardize the user's privacy.
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