If PC is your main platform for playing video games, you will know all about what Denuvo is. In case you don’t know, it is a digital rights management (DRM) technology that is used by video game developers to protect their games against piracy. However, many PC gamers are not satisfied with this system because it often negatively impacts performance in the games where it is implemented.
Players are not satisfied in this regard with Irdeto, the owners of Denuvo, because they feel harmed when buying a game on release. However, in a recent Frequently Asked Questions section on Discord (via Tech4gamers), the company has reiterated that the anti-piracy system does not affect game performance in any way, and has even explained one by one the reasons why some titles that included Denuvo at launch had performance issues.
In this sense, Irdeto has tried to explain why Denuvo does not negatively affect game performance. Cases like Tekken 7, Resident Evil Village, or the recent Star Wars Jedi: Survivor are mentioned, pointing out that the studio had not properly optimized the title, as their status improved weeks after launch with some patches. However, players do not believe the company’s answers, and on social media sites like X or Reddit, we can see their frustration in some responses.
“The sad thing is that some of the ‘Denuvo employees’ are former crackers who pirated games a decade ago,” one of them states. “They are deleting every comment that makes them look bad, even if it’s just a question or a critique,” another user claims.
Why Does Denuvo Affect Game Performance?
Although they try to deny it, the main cause is that Denuvo’s operation is based on frequent checks performed in the game to ensure that the copy is legitimate and the title has not been pirated. These types of checks use processor and memory resources, which sometimes causes an overload, especially in hardware that is not so recent. That is why it is common to see games with Denuvo having longer load times, frame rate drops, and high CPU usage.
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