Someone Inside Explains The ‘Performance Degradation Theory’ Of The ‘Denuvo’ Anti-Cheat Software That Gamers Hate So Much – GIGAZINE

Someone inside explains the ‘performance degradation theory’ of the ‘Denuvo’ anti-cheat software that gamers hate so much

Most of the games that have shipped in recent years have built-in anti-cheat tools that aim to prevent cheating, hacking, and so on. Among the anti-cheat tools, “Denuvo” is used in many games, but it is sometimes criticized by gamers who hate the performance degradation and the amount of power required due to the introduction of Denuvo. Mr. Steve Huen, chief operating officer of the game-related business of irdeto, developer of Denuvo, responds to an interview with foreign media Ars Technica.

Denuvo wants to convince you that its DRM isn’t “evil”. Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/denuvo-wants-to-convince-you-its-drm-isnt-evil/

◆ Does Denuvo hurt game performance?

Denuvo has functionality to detect in-game behavior and monitor fraud. Because of this, players have indicated that Denuvo can affect game performance, and in fact, in multiple games, the performance of the ‘normal version with Denuvo app’ and ‘pirate version with Denuvo disabled’ compared, a movie released indicates The negative effects of Denuvo, and it was reported that the ‘pirated version with Denuvo disabled has better performance’ in ‘Resident Evil Village’ released in 2021. It increases.

It is reported that the pirated version of ‘Resident Evil Village’ has better performance than the original GIGAZINE version

Regarding the comparative verification of the official version and the pirated version, Mr. Huin said, “The comparative verification is done by the pirated community. ”It doesn’t make sense,” he points out. However, as director Katsuhiro Harada stated of the fighting game “Tekken 7” in which Denuvo was adopted, “performance deterioration is due to the influence of the encoder”, and Denuvo’s performance degradation outside of the pirate community has also been noted.

Third party anti-tamper middleware. It’s a live updater and I’ve heard from them “it will be fixed soon”. We will check and update it.
Thanks
RTTiredOcean: What does an encoder do? — Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) April 13, 2018

Mr. Huin argues that the impact on performance is minimal because Denuvo is a mechanism for monitoring that ‘the code has not changed’, and a performance degradation of less than 1% is adopted as an indicator of performance testing. Assuming there is. In addition, Mr. Huin said, ‘Unfortunately, Denuvo is not reliable’, and introduced two kinds of games, ‘with Denuvo’ and ‘without Denuvo’, to the game media to restore trust. I am going to try to compare.

◆ Is Denuvo Protection effective?

Denuvo is attractive as a very powerful copy protection technology, but in 2017, the copy protection of “Resident Evil 7” that Denuvo adopted broke in just 5 days. There have been other reports of Denuvo games being hacked in a short period of time, and some players have questioned Denuvo’s performance.

The most powerful copy protection technology “Denuvo” crashed in 5 days and a pirated copy of “Resident Evil 7” appeared – GIGAZINE

by Michelle Zappa

According to Mr. Huin, Denuvo’s copy protection technology is constantly being updated, which makes cracking difficult. In fact, the subreddit ‘r/CrackWatch’, which summarizes game hack information, has data that ‘about half of Denuvo-equipped games released since 2020 have been hacked’.

[Crack Watch] games
By u/EssenseOfMagic at CrackWatch