- Despite initial fears, Resident Evil Requiem pirated versions perform no better than retail versions
- It was suspected that players who bought Requiem performance was poorer with Denuvo DRM
- There is still no Denuvo-less version of Resident Evil Requiem
Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem is among a long list of modern triple-A games from several popular studios that use Denuvo DRM to prevent piracy, which is notorious for its performance impact on games – but that’s not the case this time, at least for now.
As widely reported, Resident Evil Requiem has been cracked with the pirate scene ‘voices38’, and via the Hypervisor Denuvo bypass. Despite reports suggesting so, there are no noticeable performance differences between the cracked versions and the retail version, as highlighted on Reddit.
These cracks do not actually remove Denuvo; instead, they trick Denuvo into thinking the user is running a legitimate copy of the game, hence the term ‘bypass’. If so, it’s still unclear if Denuvo’s presence is actually holding performance back, as there’s still no Denuvo-less version of Requiem.
The article continues below
In fact, there are only rare cases where pirated games have Denuvo completely stripped of pirate scenes, a good example being Assassin’s Creed Origins of ‘Codex’ and other games where Denuvo has been removed by the developer himself.
Since Requiem is already cracked, we may see Denuvo officially removed from the game sooner than we expected. Fortunately, however, the performance is in Requiem isn’t a major concern to begin with, as it’s pretty well optimized to run at good frame rates on a wide range of hardware.
However, DRM like Denuvo for games has been shown to be detrimental to performance in the past, and Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 replay is a good example.
The Japanese developer added Enigma DRM to replace Denuvo in the game earlier in February, significantly spoiling performance on all PC configurations, before going on to remove it after heavy backlash – and that’s for a game that was pirated months after its March 2023 launch.
It’s also worth noting that while Denuvo doesn’t always break performance in games, it can easily lock SteamOS (or any other Linux distro) users out of a game for 24 hours when switching Proton modes (which is required for certain games and their functionality).
There’s no denying that Denuvo and other DRMs are very unpopular with gamers and for good reason – but for now, Requiem consumers do not have an unreasonable performance disadvantage compared to pirated versions to worry about.
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews and opinions in your feeds. Be sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on YouTube and TikTok for news, reviews, video unboxings, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp also.
