Denuvo DRM vs Denuvo Anti-Tamper

[Sabeki]

I just noticed something on the storepage that differs from other Denuvo using games I own.
This game specifies that it is using Denuvo Anti-Tamper and not Denovo DRM.

From Denuvo's own site they say there is a difference between the 2:
https://irdeto.com/denuvo/anti-tamper/

How does Anti-Tamper work?

The DRM from the game platform (like Steam, Origin or Epic) grants legitimate consumers access to the game and our Anti-Tamper solution ensures that these DRM systems are not bypassed.

What is the difference between DRM and Anti-Tamper?

A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system binds the game to a legitimate user account and allows the game to be played whenever and wherever the consumer wants to download and execute the game.

Anti-Tamper stops the reverse engineering and debugging of the DRM solution, but it has no effect or limitation on the legitimate consumer. Anti-Tamper is completely transparent to legitimate game buyers and does not in any way impose activation limits, install drivers, or require a gamer to be “always on.”

Does anyone have any other examples or experience with games that only use the Anti-Tamper and not the DRM?

[KentDA]

If its genuinely not going to require I be always on or "phone home" randomly to determine if my copy is legitimate, I'll have fewer complaints.

I still don't like the idea of DRM in any form, but so long as it can't lock me, a legitimate owner, out of my legally acquired copy of the game, I'll simply grumble about my dislike of DRM in principle.

The question is, can they prove that is indeed how it works? Because if they can't prove that's how it works, it boils down to "do I trust them?" And well, my trust in the gaming industry as a whole is exceedingly low, especially in the past 2-3 years.

[Chippawaffen]

IIRC the Total war Warhammer games and Dragon Age: Inquisition have the anti-tamper only

If I read into right the DRM part would then just be steam/origin/etc and the denvuo Anti-Tamper in question is just worrying about piracy only.

[The Former]

Another important distinction is between Denuvo Anti-Cheat and Denvuo Anti-Tamper. Anti-Cheat is the one with kernel access that can observe hardware activity and prevent certain actions. Anti-Tamper does not have this functionality.

Many confuse the two, assuming Denuvo Anti-Tamper is essentially spyware because of the capabilities of anti-cheat software.

[Sabeki]

Originally posted by Chippawaffen:

IIRC the Total war Warhammer games and Dragon Age: Inquisition have the anti-tamper only

If I read into right the DRM part would then just be steam/origin/etc and the denvuo Anti-Tamper in question is just worrying about piracy only.

That is my understanding too and if it is just the Steam license DRM and denuvo protecting that, I have less issues with it. Steam DRM never bothered me, run the game once online and you can play offline for months, see this topic on reddit about that: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/xt3xec/steam_offline_mode_has_no_time_limit_an/

[HiRed_ThuG]

Technically there is no Denuvo DRM only Anti tamper which protects DRM from being tampered with. From what I understand Denuvo doesn't do much without an actual DRM to protect.

[The Former]

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

Technically there is no Denuvo DRM only Anti tamper which protects DRM from being tampered with. From what I understand Denuvo doesn't do much without an actual DRM to protect.

This would certainly explain why Capcom has had a lot of stuttering issues via their DRM while other games that run with Denuvo don't.

[Sabeki]

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

Technically there is no Denuvo DRM only Anti tamper which protects DRM from being tampered with. From what I understand Denuvo doesn't do much without an actual DRM to protect.

The only thing that messes with performance maybe that I can find on their site is the anti-cheat and this one: https://irdeto.com/irdeto-license-management/ as a DRM solution maybe

[HiRed_ThuG]

Originally posted by Lockfågel, Paradoxriddaren:

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

Technically there is no Denuvo DRM only Anti tamper which protects DRM from being tampered with. From what I understand Denuvo doesn't do much without an actual DRM to protect.

This would certainly explain why Capcom has had a lot of stuttering issues via their DRM while other games that run with Denuvo don't.

From what I understand Capcoms DRM only had issues in Resident Evil Village. It may actually sit on top of Denuvo because crackers were able to remove it to fix the stuttering issues. I don't know the details of how it's actually implemented though. I might need to do a bit of reading.

I have a feeling that Capcom are attempting to develop something similar to Denuvo so that they don't have to pay the high fees.

Originally posted by Sabeki:

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

Technically there is no Denuvo DRM only Anti tamper which protects DRM from being tampered with. From what I understand Denuvo doesn't do much without an actual DRM to protect.

The only thing that messes with performance maybe that I can find on their site is the anti-cheat and this one: https://irdeto.com/irdeto-license-management/ as a DRM solution maybe

I'm not sure if the Anti Cheat has DRM functions but perhaps someone can shed some light. From what I can tell the major concern with the Anti Cheat is kernel level access not performance. I believe that it was flagged by some virus checkers. But anti cheat software having kernel level access is common.

[The Former]

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

Originally posted by Lockfågel, Paradoxriddaren:

This would certainly explain why Capcom has had a lot of stuttering issues via their DRM while other games that run with Denuvo don't.

From what I understand Capcoms DRM only had issues in Resident Evil Village. It may actually sit on top of Denuvo because crackers were able to remove it to fix the stuttering issues. I don't know the details of how it's actually implemented though. I might need to do a bit of reading.

I have a feeling that Capcom are attempting to develop something similar to Denuvo so that they don't have to pay the high fees.

I believe Devil May Cry 5 was said to have had some issues as well. Of course most every article bills at as "Denuvo DRM" that was eventually patched out, so apparently this misunderstanding abounds even among the journalistic circles.

Many sites were reporting that "Denuvo DRM" was also to blame for Resident Evil Village, but digging long and hard enough, there are a couple sites that can be found who report it more accurately.

[HiRed_ThuG]

Originally posted by Lockfågel, Paradoxriddaren:

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

From what I understand Capcoms DRM only had issues in Resident Evil Village. It may actually sit on top of Denuvo because crackers were able to remove it to fix the stuttering issues. I don't know the details of how it's actually implemented though. I might need to do a bit of reading.

I have a feeling that Capcom are attempting to develop something similar to Denuvo so that they don't have to pay the high fees.

I believe Devil May Cry 5 was said to have had some issues as well. Of course most every article bills at as "Denuvo DRM" that was eventually patched out, so apparently this misunderstanding abounds even among the journalistic circles.

Many sites were reporting that "Denuvo DRM" was also to blame for Resident Evil Village, but digging long and hard enough, there are a couple sites that can be found who report it more accurately.

I was around the Steam forums during the whole Devil May Cry 5 fiasco but it was really just a rumour that got out of control. The time when people actually took these Denuvo posts a little bit more seriously.

It was tested by the kings of benchmarking and they found no performance difference between the Denuvo protected version and the Denuvo free version. They had to force an extreme CPU bottleneck in order to get a performance difference.

But when there is a CPU bottleneck additional operations on the CPU generally affect framerate so it's not exactly a fair test. And as I said the bottleneck was extreme. I doubt anyone would have a hardware configuration or would be playing as such low settings to cause such a bottleneck.

https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2019-devil-may-cry-5-pc-denuvo-protection-tested

We deployed our mainstream PC gaming test system for this one, which pairs a Core i5 8400 with 16GB of 2667MHz DDR4, along with an AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB. Devil May Cry 5 itself was installed onto an SSD, and to begin with, it's fair to say that we noted no difference in performance whatsoever.

To get to the bottom of the issue, we set the game to 480p output on the lowest settings, then engaged the interlace mode, which cuts GPU utilisation further still. At this point, with the GPU removed from contention as much as possible, the CPU becomes the limiting factor in performance, and we can start to see a difference between the two versions of the PC game.

There was a modder at the time who said he knew what was causing the performance hit and said that it had nothing to do with Denuvo. I believe that he released a mod that fixed it. The same guy that fixed the performance issues with Nier:Automata.

In short there were no DRM related issues with DMC5 at least based on the evidence.

[Izuzul]

Hi-Fi Rush is anti-tamper only.

[goodluckNito]

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

In short there were no DRM related issues with DMC5 at least based on the evidence.

That's not the conclusion you can make from that article.

In this scene, the performance differential is there, and it is consistent. On our test system, Devil May Cry 5 without Denuvo runs 13 frames per second faster, with the DRM version of the code delivering 93 per cent of the performance delivered by the unprotected version. Assuming that the only difference between the two builds is indeed the inclusion of Denuvo, or the lack of it, the evidence looks conclusive.

You cannot say this evidence shows there is no performance impact simply because they lowered their graphics settings and then it did. You can maybe say that these performance impacts only happened to people on lower settings, or maybe that it only affects people with less powerful CPUs, but to say that there are "no performance impacts" is a complete contraction to the evidence provided in the article. In fact, it is even titled "Devil May Cry 5 PC's Denuvo DRM has a CPU hit"

[HiRed_ThuG]

Originally posted by goodluckNito:

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

In short there were no DRM related issues with DMC5 at least based on the evidence.

That's not the conclusion you can make from that article.

In this scene, the performance differential is there, and it is consistent. On our test system, Devil May Cry 5 without Denuvo runs 13 frames per second faster, with the DRM version of the code delivering 93 per cent of the performance delivered by the unprotected version. Assuming that the only difference between the two builds is indeed the inclusion of Denuvo, or the lack of it, the evidence looks conclusive.

You cannot say this evidence shows there is no performance impact simply because they lowered their graphics settings and then it did. You can maybe say that these performance impacts only happened to people on lower settings, or maybe that it only affects people with less powerful CPUs, but to say that there are "no performance impacts" is a complete contraction to the evidence provided in the article. In fact, it is even titled "Devil May Cry 5 PC's Denuvo DRM has a CPU hit"

As I've said they got there by forcing an extreme bottleneck. You could use such a bottleneck to say that almost any piece of software causes performance issues.

Generally if you are experiencing a CPU bottleneck you are sending more frames to the CPU than it can handle and you would probably be sending more frames than your monitor can handle too so it wouldn't really be an issue. You are basically under utilising your graphics card so it spits out a huge framerate.

Not a useful thing for normal gamers to do but great for people like Overlord Gamer to give the impression that a piece of software causes more performance issues than it actually does.

You've never seen a click bait title before?

[goodluckNito]

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

As I've said they got there by forcing an extreme bottleneck.

It was not an "extreme bottleneck", in fact they did not bottleneck anything but the potential to run the game better. They simply lowered their graphics resolution to 480p, turned the graphics settings down, and set their render mode to interlacing.

Those are all options within the game settings menu, and there is no "bottlenecking" done to the hardware to achieve this effect.

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

You could use such a bottleneck to say that almost any piece of software causes performance issues.

The argument is not "if you lower your settings the game runs worse". The argument is that the game runs better without DRM. The article tested the DRM version and DRMless version at the same "bottleneck", and the DRMless had better performance.

[HiRed_ThuG]

Originally posted by goodluckNito:

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

As I've said they got there by forcing an extreme bottleneck.

It was not an "extreme bottleneck", in fact they did not bottleneck anything but the potential to run the game better. They simply lowered their graphics resolution to 480p, turned the graphics settings down, and set their render mode to interlacing.

Those are all options within the game settings menu, and there is no "bottlenecking" done to the hardware to achieve this effect.

Originally posted by HiRed_ThuG:

You could use such a bottleneck to say that almost any piece of software causes performance issues.

The argument is not "if you lower your settings the game runs worse". The argument is that the game runs better without DRM. The article tested the DRM version and DRMless version at the same "bottleneck", and the DRMless had better performance.

It's obvious that you don't know what a CPU bottleneck is. That is an extreme bottleneck at least for that CPU. If you GPU is being underutilized because you are giving it so little work you are making a game CPU bound rather than GPU bound.