The controversial DRM system has long been blamed for poorly performing PC games.

Despite the years of complaints from PC players, Denuvo is still the go-to option when it comes to adding anti-tamper and anti-piracy measures into new game releases. It's also still just as common to hear complaints from players saying that Deunvo is responsible for any and all performance woes that a player faces when playing a video game with it included.

These claims of degraded performance come from players, they have come from the people cracking Denuvo supported titles, and they sometime even come from game developers as was the case with Tekken 7. Back in 2018, Tekken 7 director Katushiro Harada said that the the game's "anti-tamper third-party middleware" (Denuvo) was the cause of the "frame rate drops" that players were experiencing.

Now Denuvo's parent company, Irdeto, has put out there a claim that cracked versions of games do not actually perform better than the same titles with Denuvo still included. Steve Huin, the chief operating office of video games at Irdeto, says that claims of cracked titles performing better just isn't true.

These statements, made in a new interview between Huin and Ars Technica, will soon be put to the test. Irdeto will soon kick off a program in which they offer media outlets two different versions of a game to be benchmarked independently. One version will include Denuvo Anti-Tamper while the other version will be the same game without Denuvo. Huin says that he believes the tests will show that "the performance is comparable, identical" between both versions of the game.

The plan is to begin these tests within the next few months.

Tests like the ones Irdeto proposes aren't exactly new. Years back, Ars Technica themselves did a comparison of a Denuvo-free version of Batman: Arkham Knight vs a copy that still included Denuvo. They found that there was no different in performance. In 2018, PC modder Durante did a test on Final Fantasy 15 and found that outside of a 6.7% increase in load times, the Denuvo DRM had no impact on performance.

Also in 2018, the Overlord Gaming YouTube channel did their own analysis and found that there were "significant performance differences in games measured directly before and after Denuvo protection was removed."

More recently, Digital Foundry tested a cracked version of Resident Evil Village. For a while after release, Resident Evil Village suffered from some rather severe framerate and performance issues, especially when being pursued and grabbed by one of Lady Dimitrescu's daughters. Digital Foundry found that the cracked version did not exhibit these performance issues. However, Denuvo was not the only DRM that was implemented into Resident Evil Village. Capcom added their own DRM into the game on PC in addition to Denuvo, which means that the performance issues may not have been related to Denuvo at all. Capcom did later release an update that fixed these stutter and framerate issues in Village.

Beyond being blamed for performance issues in games, Denuvo is also often blamed when games just refuses to run at all. There have been verified cases where roughly 30 titles did not run at all if you had an Intel Alder Lake CPU because of the DRM used. The still existing Intel support page now notes that they worked with Microsoft and the games' publishers to get the issue resolved. Games that used Denuvo are also rendered unplayable any time the Denuvo domain goes down.

There is also the argument to be made that DRM such as Denuvo often hinders or outright stops a game from being modded in any capacity. Its inclusion also means that it may be impossible to preserve a game for the future. Right now, there is an even bigger push to preserve older titles that are simply not available anywhere to purchase. Even some more recent titles, such as Capcom's Street Fighter x Tekken and Lost Planet 2 are currently unobtainable. These titles were "temporarily" pulled from Steam almost two years ago now as they used the now defunct Games for Windows Live. Whether or not those games will ever return is anybody's guess.

Irdeto's plan to show the world that their anti-tamper and anti-piracy isn't causing performance woes is nothing but an uphill battle. Regardless of what is shown as a result of these tests, gamers are almost certainly still going to take issue with Denuvo and blame it for every little hitch or performance dip that is encountered.