The so-called "rumors" that Denuvo kills performance are not rumors. It's just not true ANYMORE. Older versions impacted performance heavily, but later on the performance impact became negligible.
I used to work at Ubisoft during the whole controversy about Denuvo killing performance in one of the recent Assassins Creeds - all I can say is we've done extensive investigation into this internally, as well as worked with Denuvo to assess these claims and they were just not true, but of course the court of public opinion has spoken so nothing we did or said could have changed it at that point.
There were some cases where there was a noticeable impact, there's quite some benchmarks out there that show a clear difference in FPS and frametimes. But it always seemed like a borked implementation to me, rather than a problem with the product itself.
All I'm saying is that at ubisoft this kind of issue was treated very seriously, not least because if we found out Denuvo was making our game look poor it would put the entire business relationship in jeopardy. We've devoted significant engineering resources on our end to investigate these reports(and yes, we have seen the benchmarks people have done), and no one was able to reproduce this with Denuvo enabled and Denuvo fully removed from the game - obviously we were able to make internal builds where Denuvo was not even present at all, and those builds performed exactly the same as those with Denuvo enabled.
All I'm going to say is that the benchmarks you see online are for pirated versions of the game where the binary isn't the same as the official patched product, and that has various implications beyond our product or Denuvo.
I think the skepticism towards internal testing is because Ubisoft is known to often release broken games that need to be patched up after release. I can't fault people for not trusting them to do internal evaluations if the public releases are in such state.
The benchmarks are sometimes comparing an old build with bypassed denuvo with a newer build with optimizations and no DRM, and claiming that performance increase is only because of no drm and not because of optimizations.
> if we found out Denuvo was making our game look poor it would put the entire business relationship in jeopardy
I think Denuvo is going to have that effect regardless of the performance impact.
> All I'm going to say is that the benchmarks you see online are for pirated versions of the game where the binary isn't the same as the official patched product, and that has various implications beyond our product or Denuvo.
Wait, are you suggesting that pirated versions might run better than the official ones, regardless of their DRM?
>>I think Denuvo is going to have that effect regardless of the performance impact.
Sure, but as always it's a business decision - is the impact of Denuvo on the number of copies sold big enough to offset the fact that Denuvo does actually work and stops some games from being pirated for weeks if not months after launch? I don't know, I never had any view into that data, but I assume it must be the case or otherwise no one would use it.
>>Wait, are you suggesting that pirated versions might run better than the official ones, regardless of their DRM?
No, I'm not suggesting anything. I'm just saying that it's not directly comparable, for instance because the binary will be treated differently by graphics drivers, for better or worse. Also you don't know exactly which version was being compared by who and when and how.
Obviously, you don't have to believe me that Ubisoft engineers have spent significant amount of time testing this in all kinds of configurations - I have no way to prove that, especially since I don't work there anymore.
Lol I used to wonder if the opposite is actually true. The current flavor of Denuvo cracks need to detour so many CPUID checks and winapi calls while also having most of the virtualization and obfuscation intact I wouldn't be surprised if this ends up costing more performance then just having the original protection intact.
It seems you did not actually read what I wrote. I put anymore in caps for a reason.
I never said any recent AC title or any newer Denuvo version suffers from any FPS issues. The loading of games (startup only I think, not level loading) is in fact still very much impacted, especially in the first run.
So all what you wrote is pretty pointless. Denuvo in the past in fact slowed down FPS of games early on as it was making calls the slowed down FPS on every single frame. People did the testing of games after they got cracked, and the cracked versions ran faster.
>>It seems you did not actually read what I wrote. I put anymore in caps for a reason.
And.....did you read what I wrote? I brought up AC specifically because people online have been saying that the cracked version is faster, which I know we have tested at Ubisoft alongside with engineers from Denuvo and found it not to be true. You can of course choose to not believe me, it's the internet after all.
If you say "well I didn't mean AC" then cool, but I had no possible way of knowing what you mean, or what your cut off point is, "anymore" is not a very definitive point in time.
Yes, I did read what you wrote, and you wrote is as a rebuttal or a debunking of my factual statement.
> If you say "well I didn't mean AC" then cool, but I had no possible way of knowing what you mean, or what your cut off point is, "anymore" is not a very definitive point in time.
So because I not specifically mention any title, you just make it about yourself and what you are to have worked on ... that is an incredible cheap and dishonest excuse. "Oh you not specific X enough so I just assume you mean Y." Silly.
> You can of course choose to not believe me, it's the internet after all.
See, and STILL you assume or are so desperate that I suddenly choose not to believe you after I told you never I was obviously talking about old versions that were proven to have an FPS impact. Childish.
If I wanted to argue against that I would mock you for working with en engineer from Denuvo on it, hardly and bias there ;)
End if the day face is Denovo still sucks ass, even if you can not measure any FPS loss anymore, dev remove it after cracks/leaks or even just time passed for a reason that is not just money, its insane bloated shitty VM layer that slows down the games' startup, bloats the games executables up to insane sizes. Legit consumers hate it and want it gone.
And I am aware that certain idiots on Reddit and YouTube post fake videos of more up-to-date titles claiming huge FPS loses, and they continue to claim even recent versions of Denovo eats FPS because they just want it to be true so bad, or they actually compare different versions for games where It's not about the removed D but about the updated game. I never made any indication that I am like that, in fact I made it very clear that I am not. If you actually read what I wrote, it makes your answer even worse. You are just desperate. Go on Reddit r/crackwatch or something like that you will find plenty of people you can fight with, they won't take you working with an Denuvo dev on figuring out supposed facts serious either ;)
You've taken it waaaaaay too personally. No one is attacking you, your statement, it wasn't even meant to be a rebuttal of what you said, I literally just wanted to share a story from my experience.
From reading upthread it sounds like performance impact is heavily dependent on the skill of the game development team, ie: if they pick the wrong things to hook during the in-game runtime checks performance can suffer greatly
