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.
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.