I know that finding this answer is insanely difficult (or, at least, I imagine it is) but I really am left wondering what exactly the DRM is doing while the game is active to have such a process/resource overhead.
Like, async tasks that are holding a thread hostage until it’s sync point? Trying to run huge hash tasks to ensure local storage of game files are “intact”? And seriously, 1.5 - 2GB of RAM utilization? I have to imagine that’s not actually memory in use, but is just holding a giant block of gobbledegook so its harder to reverse?
I’m not a software engineer, so I must be way off the mark, but from my small experience in the dev world as a QA person, the performance uplifts from removing DRM should not be this palpable… Right? I feel sorry for the actual devs who essentially just “find out” that their work is getting quite literally crippled by something that is universally hated by the consumer AND got cracked in 40 days of release.
Based on this, I think it’s a combination of factors. Besides the periodic runtime checks to verify your hardware fingerprint, it also does on-the-fly decryption of some values, and apparently does weird things with the stack. The decryption could have a big impact on memory consumption and performance, depending on the amount of data.
That post says the performance impact in Hogwarts Legacy is negligible (even if their technique for measuring is imperfect), but I suspect that Denuvo is configurable by the dev. Maybe Capcom raised the slider up to 11, but WB kept it lower?
Yeah, how bad Denuvo is performancewise definitely depends on the specific integration - there have been titles where Denuvo just tanks the performance because it checks a ton of values per second, and others where it really doesn’t matter - I would say Hogwarts Legacy falls in the second category, where checks have been intelligently stuffed into loading sequences and scene transitions. Capcom normally falls into the first category.
How I heard it explained was that Denuvo picks a point in the program to insert its DRM checks. If it picks a point in a function that gets called a lot, like once every frame, it’s going to do that DRM check every frame. If the check is slow, every frame takes that much extra time to render.
I don’t know for sure, but some things that computers do are fast because the memory is in order in RAM and the processor gets to run something on it contiguously without interruption. If denuvo was doing something in the middle of that type of process it could easily hurt performance. If it straight up uses more RAM, just that could hurt performance, because a smaller percentage of the memory can fit in cache at a time.
I know that finding this answer is insanely difficult (or, at least, I imagine it is) but I really am left wondering what exactly the DRM is doing while the game is active to have such a process/resource overhead.
Like, async tasks that are holding a thread hostage until it’s sync point? Trying to run huge hash tasks to ensure local storage of game files are “intact”? And seriously, 1.5 - 2GB of RAM utilization? I have to imagine that’s not actually memory in use, but is just holding a giant block of gobbledegook so its harder to reverse?
I’m not a software engineer, so I must be way off the mark, but from my small experience in the dev world as a QA person, the performance uplifts from removing DRM should not be this palpable… Right? I feel sorry for the actual devs who essentially just “find out” that their work is getting quite literally crippled by something that is universally hated by the consumer AND got cracked in 40 days of release.
Based on this, I think it’s a combination of factors. Besides the periodic runtime checks to verify your hardware fingerprint, it also does on-the-fly decryption of some values, and apparently does weird things with the stack. The decryption could have a big impact on memory consumption and performance, depending on the amount of data.
That post says the performance impact in Hogwarts Legacy is negligible (even if their technique for measuring is imperfect), but I suspect that Denuvo is configurable by the dev. Maybe Capcom raised the slider up to 11, but WB kept it lower?
Yeah, how bad Denuvo is performancewise definitely depends on the specific integration - there have been titles where Denuvo just tanks the performance because it checks a ton of values per second, and others where it really doesn’t matter - I would say Hogwarts Legacy falls in the second category, where checks have been intelligently stuffed into loading sequences and scene transitions. Capcom normally falls into the first category.
How I heard it explained was that Denuvo picks a point in the program to insert its DRM checks. If it picks a point in a function that gets called a lot, like once every frame, it’s going to do that DRM check every frame. If the check is slow, every frame takes that much extra time to render.
I don’t know for sure, but some things that computers do are fast because the memory is in order in RAM and the processor gets to run something on it contiguously without interruption. If denuvo was doing something in the middle of that type of process it could easily hurt performance. If it straight up uses more RAM, just that could hurt performance, because a smaller percentage of the memory can fit in cache at a time.