Comment by delecti
18 hours ago
It can, but that seems to be more related to poor implementations by the game devs, and not inherent to it. There are plenty of examples of games with Denuvo that still run fine (give or take your opinion on whether the presence of DRM is inherently "impacted performance").
If many of your users misuse your tool, that's a design problem not user error
There's a valid point there, but that's stating it way too strongly.
I haven't seen their documentation, maybe the problem lies there. But there's no tool or documentation so perfect that nobody can use it wrong.
Yeah, goddamn hammers needs to be way softer, do you know how many thumbs worldwide have been hurt by them? Clearly the fault of the hammer.
If I have you hammer with a wax coated handle then it will regularly slip out of your hand.
One could blame the user for not "just" holding it right. Or alternatively reconsider if the handle should have a grippy coating instead.
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Isn't Denuvo actually implemented in a game by the DRM developers, though? I remember reading that they have a process where the game dev sends Denuvo an unprotected executable, who adds the DRM to that executable and sends it back.
Thus, I believe the poor implementations are directly the fault of Denuvo.
I think that used to be the case years ago but isn't anymore.
The games run terribly on release because they have Denuvo, and then when the sales volume no longer justifies the licensing costs of Denuvo, the devs strip it out and sell it to the players in patch notes as "optimizing performance."
Someone else mentioned GTA getting more aggressive copy protection out of nowhere. It's not out of nowhere. With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection.
Denuvo has layers upon layers of obfuscation that inflates nearly every instruction and function call, extra code execution that does nothing to throw off someone trying to follow code execution paths, and constant moving around where the game stores stuff in memory, again, to throw someone off watching via debugger.
It's pathetic because one company has been almost entirely responsible for people needing to buy faster and faster CPUs and GPUs trying to eek out more and more performance. CPUs, GPUs, memory - all of it has gotten enormously faster, we have more cores, etc. Despite all that, every new game barely runs at 60fps.
Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
> With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection
How does that justify it? Adding stronger DRM when cracked copies of the same content are already out there is like trying to get insurance after your house has already burnt down.
> Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
If you strictly want to blame Denuvo then that assumes game developers cannot think of a way to spend their extra performance either. Which is obviously not the case.
I would assume the cache misses alone will destroy any performance.