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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: 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?
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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.
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.
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(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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