Denuvo plans to debunk a common criticism for PC gaming

Denuvo, the digital rights management (DRM) software that many players consider the bane of PC gaming might not be as evil as they think. At least that's what Denuvo's COO, Steeve Huin, has to say about the impact of the DRM's implementation on performance. The anti-tamper DRM's impact on PC game performance is something that has been in debate ad nauseam.

The anti-tamper software has been the go-to solution for many big and small development studios and publishers when it comes to tackling the risk of piracy. However, there have been instances where players found tangible evidence of the software causing CPU bottlenecks in games.

Capcom's Resident Evil Village is one of the most recent examples where Denuvo caused massive CPU-related hitching and stutters. However, in a recent interview, Huin stated that the latest iteration of their DRM software does not incur any performance penalty on PC games.

And to prove that, Irdeto (parent company of Denuvo) will allow independent benchmarking of both versions of games, one with the DRM and the other without it.

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Denuvo plans to prove its DRM doesn't directly affect performance in PC games

Regarding Denuvo's impact on PC performance and the stigma players have regarding the implementation of DRM in PC games, Huin stated:

"Gamers almost never get access to the same version of a game protected and unprotected. Over the game's lifetime, there might be a protected and unprotected version, but these are not comparable because these are different builds over six months, many bug fixes, etc., which could make it better or worse. We put in the effort of applying the security and validating that the performance is as it was and is not impacted..."

He went on to say:

"In the case of anti-tamper, I think there is a clear statement that there is no perceptible impact on gameplay because of the way we do things."

To give players definitive proof of their claim regarding the anti-tamper DRM's negligible impact on performance, Irdeto will allow independent benchmarking of games:

"Our voice is unfortunately not sufficient to convince people because we're not trusted in their mind as a starting point in that debate. You will see for yourself that the performance is comparable, identical... and that would provide something that would hopefully be trusted by the community."

Denuvo's impact on performance is indeed mostly minimal, and most of the issues players face with PC ports are due to the lack of proper optimization. However, implementing a DRM does add additional computational stress on the CPU, which might present some unexpected performance hiccups, especially in CPU-intensive titles.

Most modern multi-core CPUs are more than capable of handling the stress of a DRM. However, the anti-tamper software still hogs precious CPU resources that can otherwise be used by the game itself. There are examples of games that have not shown any tangible impact of Denuvo on their performance, an example being Final Fantasy XV.

However, at the same time, plenty of games exhibited tangible performance degradation with the DRM's implementation, such as Capcom's Resident Evil games, Devil May Cry 5, and Assassin's Creed Origins. With Irdeto's plans of independent benchmarking, perhaps players will finally be able to get a definitive answer to their DRM-related dilemma.