The Negative Effects of Denuvo DRM on Gaming Performance and Energy Efficiency

The most popular anti-piracy protection for games, i.e. Denuvo, is known for straining the computer while playing. Many gamers observe a lower fluidity of the game with DRM and a greater appetite for resources. This is actually nothing new.

It’s not just FPS that suffers from DRM

What else is affected by Denuvo? In addition to the mishaps, such as cutting players off from online gaming, there are other downsides to using DRM. When they are much larger than they should be – often several times. A famous example is Borderlands 3. The main executable of the game weighs 108 MB, Denuvo adds to this … 429 MB! This almost quadruples the game.

On the YetTea channel, the loading times of six games with and without Denuvo were examined. The results are not surprising, but they are quite scary. The aforementioned third part Borderlands behaves as follows:

• loading main menu from Denuvo: 102.88 seconds;
• loading main menu without Denuvo: 61.8 seconds.

This is not an isolated case. Ace Combat 7 It’s even worse with security:

• loading main menu from Denuvo: 200 seconds;
• loading main menu without Denuvo: 54 seconds.

Denuvo almost tripled the menu loading time Shadow of the Tomb Raider, from 29 to 86 seconds. The loading time of the games we tested miraculously did not suffer Dying Light 2: Stay Human.

Another factor that speaks against Denuvo is energy saving. This can be seen in the example of the new one Tomb Raidera. In the version with Denuvo, the processor is more heavily loaded and its temperature is several degrees higher than when the game runs without DRM. This, of course, means additional energy expenditure. What for? And so that the Denuvo software can count the checksums of the code executed while playing over and over again. On one computer, it probably doesn’t matter, but globally, it looks like a waste of precious energy.

Anyway, Denuvo is not as great as its authors would like to believe. There was even a case of Denuvo breaking Hitman 2 in 2018 for a few days … before the official release of the game.