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Bethesda announced that a new update was released today for the Steam version of Rage 2. This update, among other things, removes the always dreaded Denuvo DRM.
Denuvo was included at the launch of the game on Steam, but was curiously missing from the Bethesda.net Launcher version that came out at the same time. Fans were a bit curious (and upset) over this. The ongoing theory is that Denuvo was utilized on Steam to prevent Rage 2 from getting leaked early from those with access to the review build. Reviews of the PC version of Rage 2 were done through Steam and presumably done on a final or very near final build of the game. It just so happened that when the same build was then pushed to the public, it retained the added Denuvo.
Whoops!
Thankfully, today's update removed it from the game. The full list of changes in today's update can be found below.
Today, we will be deploying a minor PC hotfix very shortly that will address the following issues:
Removes Denuvo DRM (We saw a few requests.)
Removes Denuvo DRM (We saw a few requests.)
- Enables Crash Reporter for error reporting
- Fixes occasional crash related to Scaleform
- Fixes occasional crash on startup
- Fixes issue where Bethesda.net users would always default to English
- Razer Chroma effects enabled by default
It's no SafeDisc that's for sure.
I know the most typical complaint is that is has an impact on performance. Now, just because I've never been able to attribute performance issues to Denuvo doesn't mean I haven't experienced it. Most times I complete (or ditch) a game before Denuvo is ever removed for it anyway.
With Rage 2, it seems like the update yesterday, which removed Denuvo, made performance worse? https://www.pcgamer.com/rage-2-patch...ance-is-worse/
I don't exactly trust PCG for much of anything, let alone for benchmarks, but that's what they found in their testing. The problem of course is that the update didn't "just" remove Denuvo so it's also not a straightforward comparison. It's also very possible that these tests were conducted both before and after the latest Windows update. This update including mitigations for yet another Intel CPU security flaw, which could negatively impact performance. There was also another update included that lessened the negative impact of a previous security patch for a different Intel CPU security issue. So yeah, far too many variables for my liking.
But at the end of the day, I've seen tons of people that have said how their performance is better or at least more stable after Denuvo was removed from other games. So there's almost certainly something to back up the claims about how Denuvo has an overall negative impact.