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This week, a cracked version of Resident Evil Village was released by Empress. With it came word that this cracked release pretty much eliminated the very severe and very apparent framerate dips and hitching found in the official release of the game. The culprit seemed to be a double whammy of DRM that Capcom implemented into the game: Denuvo and Capcom's own DRM system.
The hitching and framerate drops were very apparent any time an enemy died and with the fly swarm and grab attack from the vampire sisters. If you did not encounter these issues while playing, you were most definitely an exception to the rule here. The claims that the cracked version performed better than the official release came from a number of channels.
Most recently, Digital Foundry did their own investigation into the claims. You can see that video below. The short of it is that yes, the cracked version eliminated the hitching and framerate drops. It did so by bypassing the DRM checks or outright removing certain attacks that would trigger DRM checks, such as the grab move by the sisters.
Denuvo claims that their DRM has nothing to do with the performance issues in Resident Evil Village.
"At Denuvo, we understand that an uninterrupted gaming experience is key, after all we're gamers too. With respect to the recent piracy and tampering of Resident Evil Village, we have run multiple tests on multiple machines and there is no difference in game experience on the legitimate version protected with Denuvo Anti-Tamper, versus the unprotected version without Denuvo Anti-Tamper. We cannot comment specifically on the Capcom implementations as they are unrelated to Denuvo's solution."
"The team are working on a patch to address PC performance issues, it should be available soon - we'll have more details shortly."
