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
Related Stories
The developers at Denuvo have been in the news thanks to cracks against their notoriously tough digital rights management (DRM) tools, which are normally used to lock down video games from leaking online. On Sunday, the company faced a different kind of crack—not against a high-profile video game, however, but of its depository of private web-form messages. A significant number of these appear to come from game makers, with many requesting information about applying Denuvo's DRM to upcoming games.
The first proof of this leak appears to come from imageboard site 4chan, where an anonymous user posted a link to a log file hosted at the denuvo.com domain. This 11MB file (still online as of press time) apparently contains messages submitted via Denuvo's public contact form dating back to April 25, 2014. In fact, much of Denuvo's web database content appears to be entirely unsecured, with root directories for "fileadmin" and "logs" sitting in the open right now.
Combing the log file brings up countless spam messages, along with complaints, confused "why won't this game work" queries from apparent pirates, and even threats (an example: "for what you did to arkham knight I will find you and I will kill you and all of your loved ones, this I promise you CEO of this SHIT drm"). But since Denuvo's contact page does not contain a link to a private e-mail address—only a contact form and a phone number to the company's Austrian headquarters—the form appears to also have been used by many game developers and publishers.
The log, as hosted at Denuvo.com, contains queries with legitimate reply addresses at current game studios. Those include a requests from the following: 343 Industries, about applying Denuvo to upcoming Halo Wars games on PC; Microsoft, in a 2015 message describing Denuvo as something that would fit with "an upcoming initiative"; TaleWorlds, about adding DRM to the sequel to its Mount & Blade franchise; Harmonix Games, about scheduling an in-person meeting at this March's Game Developers Conference to talk DRM; Capcom, with multiple requests—one of which is described as a Windows 10 UWP release for 2016 (which could mean this past December's Dead Rising 4, which indeed shipped on UWP with Denuvo DRM); Ninja Theory, who sent a query about DRM for its upcoming adventure game Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice; and many more.
Source:
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Ah, Denuvo; the anti-tamper tech that a lot of gamers hate. And while some people may claim that this attitude comes from the fact that the games powered by it are hard to crack, the latest triple-A game powered by it, PREY, has already been cracked.
While it did not break the record for the fastest Denuvo-powered game cracked, it’s a real surprise that the latest, and more powerful, version of the Denuvo is unable to protect these games for more than ten days.
For what it’s worth, Resident Evil VII remains the fastest cracked Denuvo-powered game as it was cracked in just five days, while Mass Effect: Andromeda is close to PREY as it was cracked in ten – more or less – days.
Source: Dark Side of Gaming
Game studios that use digital rights management (DRM) tools tend to defend it to the death, even after it's been cracked. It prevents 'casual' piracy and cheating, they sometimes argue. However, Rime developer Tequila Works is taking a decidedly different approach. It claims that it'll remove Denuvo, the anti-tampering/DRM system on the Windows version of Rime, if someone cracks its island puzzle title. This is an odd promise to make, especially since it amounts to an inadvertent dare -- find a way to break in and the developers will eliminate the need for that crack.
This wouldn't be so unusual a statement if there weren't a history of Denuvo cracks. While it's harder to defeat this code than earlier schemes, it's definitely not impossible. Recent games like Resident Evil 7 and Prey had their Denuvo implementations broken within days of release, while developers have patched it out on titles like Doom and Inside. Tequila Works is aware that cracking is likely more a question of "when" than "if," but it appears to be optimistic about the challenge involved.
Source: ArsTechnica
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
The new Denuvo system 'protecting' the game 'RiME' has been defeated in less than a week. This is notable, not least since the developers promised to remove Denuvo if it was cracked. Furthermore, a report from the cracker suggests that an apparently desperate Denuvo pulled out all the stops to protect RiME, but still failed.
[...] In a fanfare of celebrations, rising cracking star Baldman announced that he had defeated the latest v4+ iteration of Denuvo and dumped a cracked copy of RiME online. While encouraging people to buy what he describes as a "super nice" game, Baldman was less complimentary about Denuvo.
Labeling the anti-tamper technology a "huge abomination," the cracker said that Denuvo's creators had really upped their efforts this time out. People like Baldman who work on Denuvo talk of the protection calling on code 'triggers.' For RiME, things were reportedly amped up to 11.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/new-control-denuvo-piracy-protection-cracked-170602/
There has been a fair amount of interest or news regard the Denuvo DRM/Anti-tampering software during the last few weeks -- from how hard it is to crack, the performance impact on the games protected by it and how they apparently are trying to use other peoples software on the cheap. Released a day or so ago a new way to circumvent the protection.
The latest "crack" is apparently that of Dishonored 2, which was released in the stores (or on steam) in November '16. The difference to the previous workarounds is that this time it apparently includes a keygenerator. So files remain intact and instead it validates the game as real and proper. That is one way to work around the issue of never having to remove any protection. That might still leave it with the second complaint and problem with Denuvo tho and that is that with this way it will retain all the performance issues the games appear to have while the protection is alive and active.
STEAMPUNKS are proud to bring you the first release including a real Denuvo license generator with untouched game executable. Your license will be regenerated if needed (hw change, os updates) Enjoy The Power We just gave you.
Source: xRel
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Over the past few years, the name Voksi has become synonymous with game cracking, in particular when it comes to anti-Denuvo activities. This week the talented Bulgarian released a 90-minute video in which he reveals how he cracked V4 of the infamous anti-tamper technology. TorrentFreak caught up with him for the lowdown.
Source: https://torrentfreak.com/voksi-releases-detailed-denuvo-cracking-video-tutorial-180210/
Denuvo "is an anti-tamper technology and digital rights management (DRM) scheme developed by the Austrian company Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH".
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 Accused of Using Unlicensed Software to Protect its Anti-Piracy Tool
Denuvo License Generator is Latest Circumvention Method
According to TorrentFreak, the long-awaiting stealth game Hitman 2 — which comes 'protected' by the latest variant of Denuvo (v5.3) — leaked online. Aside from having its protection circumvented, this happened three days before the title's official launch on November 13.
It appears that a relatively new cracking group called FCKDRM obtained a version of Hitman 2 that was only available to those who pre-ordered the game. While several groups have been chipping away at Denuvo for some time, FCKDRM is a new entrant (at least by branding) to the cracking scene. (Note: The group is not related to the FCKDRM initiative, an anti-DRM site launched by GOG.com, even though it does use the logo.)
It should be noted that the owners of Denuvo released marketing material a few months ago suggesting that even 4 days of protection (actually even hours according to them) is worth the price of their DRM. (However, no mention of -3 days.)
New 'Valeroa' Anti-Piracy System Cracked "In 20 Minutes" - TorrentFreak
Situated on top of regular DRM, Denuvo has made its way to the top of the pile as one of the most effective and hated (by pirates at least) anti-tamper technologies. This reputation has in part been earned through its ability to prevent low-level crackers from defeating its locks but also due to a perception that it can be anti-consumer.
With this reputation, Denuvo is consistently targeted by crackers, who are getting more and more successful in defeating the technology. A few days’ protection now seems to be the most the product can offer, with the company itself now openly suggesting that a couple of weeks’ protection is a reasonable aim and valuable in itself.
Given Denuvo’s profile, it was interesting to see an apparently new technology being touted by its makers a few months ago. Dubbed ‘Valeroa‘, this new kid on the anti-tamper block seems to have Denuvo in its sights, with interesting marketing which presents the tech as a more consumer-friendly tool to achieve the same aims.
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.
Dr. Lisa Su, the president and CEO of AMD, will be joined by various guests to discuss new computing tech and its applications—from solving world issues to shaping the future of video games, virtual reality, and more. Read on for a rundown of when and where to watch the keynote live.
AMD will hold its CES 2019 keynote on Wednesday, January 9 at 9am PT/12pm ET/5pm UK (Thursday, January 10 at 4am AET). The event will be streamed live from the Venetian in Las Vegas, and viewable here on IGN.
AMD YouTube stream. Also at AnandTech, Tom's Hardware, and Wccftech.
At AMD's CES 2019 keynote, CEO Lisa Su revealed the Radeon VII, a $700 GPU built on TSMC's "7nm" process. The GPU should have around the same performance and price as Nvidia's already-released RTX 2080. While it does not have any dedicated ray-tracing capabilities, it includes 16 GB of High Bandwidth Memory.
Nvidia's CEO has trashed his competitor's new GPU, calling it "underwhelming" and "lousy". Meanwhile, Nvidia has announced that it will support Adaptive Sync, the standardized version of AMD's FreeSync dynamic refresh rate and anti-screen tearing technology. Lisa Su also says that AMD is working on supporting ray tracing in future GPUs, but that the ecosystem is not ready yet.
Su also showed off a third-generation Ryzen CPU at the CES keynote, but did not announce a release date or lineup details. Like the second generation of Epyc server CPUs, the new Ryzen CPUs will be primarily built on TSMC's "7nm" process, but will include a "14nm" GlobalFoundries I/O part that includes the memory controllers and PCIe lanes. The CPUs will support PCIe 4.0.
The Ryzen 3000-series ("Matisse") should provide a roughly 15% single-threaded performance increase while significantly lowering power consumption. However, it has been speculated that the chips could include up to 16 cores or 8 cores with a separate graphics chiplet. AMD has denied that there will be a variant with integrated graphics, but Lisa Su has left the door open for 12- or 16-core versions of Ryzen, saying that "There is some extra room on that package, and I think you might expect we'll have more than eight cores". Here's "that package".
Also at The Verge.
Previously: Watch AMD's CES 2019 Keynote Live: 9am PT/12pm ET/5pm UK
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 09 2019, @08:50PM (8 children)
support slaveware get treated like a slave.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by RandomFactor on Saturday March 09 2019, @09:06PM (7 children)
Figure out a way to do DRM without screwing over your paying customers or don't do DRM.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(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?
compiling...
(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.
compiling...
(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.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday March 10 2019, @01:08AM (6 children)
Let's not forget that "DRM sucks" cuts both ways. Just as DRM is mostly ineffective at preventing piracy, DRM would be equally ineffective at protecting personal data. Personal privacy suffers from the same problem that it is fundamentally impossible to protect data or information because it is so easy to copy and distribute. Hell, our DNA is proof of that, which can be traced by hundreds of thousands of years or more depending on where you want to draw the line.
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Sunday March 10 2019, @01:44AM (2 children)
FWIW, DNA never wanted to avoid getting copied. So your analogy is flawed at it's base. I think the argument is basically sound, but redo that analogy.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:38PM (1 child)
It's funny that you bring that up.
DNA doesn't "want" anything. It is not sentient and has no desire. The fact that any piece of information that is capable of evolution and reproduction will survive and become dominant is a simple natural or mathematical phenomenon.
The concept of a meme is a unit of cultural information that evolves and reproduces like a gene (hence the name). Memes are not sentient and have no desire. Yet, memes that are capable of reproducing (as a parasite using a sentient species as a host and transmitter, namely humans) and evolving (having "meme" potential) will proliferate. Of course, luck is also an important element.
This is basically true of all information, including stories, file formats, standards, etc.
And this is also true of personal data. Personal data doesn't "desire" to either be copied or not be copied. However, they have *very* willing host transmitters (basically every organization in existence) and so personal data will get spread like horny bunnies.
The way to control information spread is DRM, and it doesn't work. It doesn't work for movies, it doesn't work for memes, it doesn't work for personal data.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 11 2019, @04:08PM
If you insist. DNA is the unit of heredity that is preserved. When multiple variations exist, those that generate phenotypes that are more appropriate to the environment persist. RNA is not a unit of heredity, though it carries the messages from DNA. Neither has any desire, but DNA *acts*, over time, as if it had a desire to survive. Therefore to say that "DNA wants to be copied" is a shorthand that can be translated reasonably directly into appropriate genetic language.
FWIW, I have no direct evidence that other people have desires, either, but they ACT as if they do, so I say they do. In the case of other people this is probably a correct direct statement, but there's no proof of this. (There are several rather convincing lines of evidence, but that's not proof.) In the case of DNA there's a fairly straightforward translation into an exact mathematical expression that also fits every case where I would otherwise use the term "it wants that". So denying that "DNA wants to be copied" is believing your models over direct experience. There are good arguments why this is appropriate, but this isn't a straightforwards argument. So the shorthand formulation isn't unreasonable. (And you don't want the long formulation.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday March 10 2019, @05:02AM (2 children)
Keeping private information private is also a vastly different beast than trying to have people run code and not be able to see what they're running ... or something. Basically, encryption works, DRM tries to use it to do the impossible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 10 2019, @08:05PM
DRM and Encrypted databases both.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday March 10 2019, @11:30PM
A company trying to restrict how you use their movie file is no different than a user trying to restrict how a company uses their vacation photos. You seem to be drawing a distinction between raw executable code like games and a user's location data, but code and data are basically the same thing: digital information which is interpreted by a computer Lispers know this quite well, as well as to a lesser extent interpreted language programmers and any media player programmers that have been hit by code execution vulnerabilities.
The premise of course is that users do send their personal data to a company to be used somehow, but if we're being honest, that cat's already out of the bag. Simply being part of society, by definition, entails leaking/sharing personal information. Once anyone else other than yourself has the data, DRM is the only way to control the data, and DRM doesn't work.
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