If there’s one way to make me instantly lose any semblance of respect I might have otherwise had for you, it’s to tell a blatant lie like this. I despise liars.
And I’ve seen Steam fanboys on the Steam forums who insist that the rumors of performance problems are baseless. They can go pleasure themselves with rusty cacti.
It’s not always about the performance impact…DRM has been known to restrict and prevent legitimate gamers from playing the games meanwhile those that sail the high seas ignore the useless DRM and continue to play.
preventing legitimate gamers from playing a game they bought in anyway is inexcusable to me. I dont even want to sign into your “social club” or download another launcher. If i have to put in one more address and password than necessary I’m much more likely to get an illegitimate copy.
Creative’s dedicated sound cards still make a difference when PCs struggle to sustain 30FPSon certain games, (and can help getting a stable 60FPS) on poorly optimized titles (or games that have been plagued by Denuvo).
I suspect it mainly has to do with the fact that Windows usually outputs uncompressed audio (due to requiring extra licencing for codecs like Dolby on a general-purpose PC, unlike consoles).
Because of that, a dedicated sound card will take that weight off the CPU.
In my case in particular, i noticed an 5-8FPS increase when playing AC:Revelations with my dedicated sound card (bear in mind, my CPU is merely a Core 2 Duo), but that’s because i still don’t have the money to upgrade my whole rig.
Back on topic, i saw a video by Anton’s Hardware that made a deep research on the topic, and while the conclusion was that, yes, on current games & hardware it didin’t make up much of a difference, it could be useful for specific cases, (in some poorly optimized games you can get better frames, and in well-optimized games can push FPS a bit further.
To finally end my comment, i’ll add a link to the video i just mentioned, along with one of the comments that i think demonstrates a “best case scenario” for the use of a sound card in current gaming.
I used to use sound cards myself ages ago for MIDI and DirectSound acceleration. I didn’t expect the hardware audio codecs to actually make a difference.
Nothing is stopping me from installing a PCIe Sound Blaster with a good old EMU chip. At least I hope so, the EMU10k1 and 20k1 have a hardware DMA bug which breaks them on systems with more than 2GB of memory lol
Not sure if I should go the CMedia route and just use Xonar instead. I do like Creative’s features (especially ALchemy), but those you can gain on any machine using a software suite made by Creative themselves.
I mean i don’t remember having audio driver issues last time i used Ubuntu on my desktop PC (i think at the time i had an Audigy SE, now i have an X-Fi XtremeGamer).
You got me curious, i’ll try it as soon as i can and i’ll tell you back the results.
Denuvo is at least understandable when it’s added to a game on launch to curb pirates for that crucial moment. But like a dragon has been cracked for over two years now, it has no business still having Denuvo.
The way I see it, it’s like if someone barged into my house and settled behind my ficus tree, telling me that I won’t notice them in my daily life. I don’t care how actually inconspicuous they are, I don’t want intruders under my roof period.
I wouldn’t say that it’s evil, but rather it doesn’t exist for the benefit of players, it exists for the benefit of corporations. They know that it hurts performance in games and prevents a lot of people from playing games that they’ve legitimately purchased, but so long as it’s preventing some piracy they do not care.
Except it doesn’t prevent any piracy. Pirates strip the DRM away within hours or days, and then the game runs better for the pirates than the paying customers.
So, you have a small window of the game being “protected” but that’s the same window that people on the fence ab out the game wouldn’t have bought it anyway.
IT doesn’t need to be good at stopping piracy as long as it stops some piracy, or at least as long as they can sweet talk executives into believing it makes a difference.
Denovo isnt getting cracked in days. Sure Empress cracks it, but they are doing a handful of games per year. Most games with Denovo are years to never cracked.
The article is a puff piece about how the company behind Denuvo totally has data that says their root kit doesn’t negatively impact performance.
They assert this with the same sort of confidence that I had back in 3rd grade when I claimed to have a girlfriend, just one that went to a different school and no, you wouldn’t know her.
The interviewer completely ignores the massive amounts of 3rd party data that says, yes, Denuvo is cancer that makes games run like shit while also making it easier to hack people’s computers. Doesn’t bring it up at all.
Now for my part, I had to actually look to other sources to see what the current crack speed was, because I’m not going to trust a puff piece to be honest. I remember plenty of stories about how Denuvo was “uncrackable” and then cracked in literal hours.
Sadly, current crack speeds are much slower than they were just a couple years ago when I had last looked. Only one person is still bothering to crack Denuvo, and the company is constantly downloading the cracks and patching around them.
It’s not a puff piece, it’s an interview that clearly prefaced his comments with background info about Denuvos performance impact. You can disagree with it (I do) without discrediting the article.
Also, as far as I know Denuvo games have always been slower to crack.
Been a while since I pirated games so idk just how out of the loop I am, but It looks to me that Denuvo games took longer because not a lot of people work on them. I could be wrong, of course, but Empress seems to crack them quickly.
I agree on the point that Denuvo DRM negatively impacts performance but I’m not sure where you got the idea it can get stripped away. Very few games using Denuvo have been cracked, unfortunately it’s very good at its job.
I admit to being a bit out of the loop on new games/cracks. The last time I look was a couple of years back, when Denuvo was being cracked with zero day exploits.
So, looking it up now, there’s just one cracker left working Denuvo, and the company downloads the cracks themselves and reverse engineers them to make future cracking harder…
It is a difficult problem, but there have been a lot of cracked Denuvo games, even in this article, it mentions that about half of the released Denuvo games have been cracked out of a total of 127, that’s not a small amount.
It is true though that Denuvo is complex and there’s currently only one person who has been doing them for a bit and that person is presenting as very very mentally ill and may also be on a break… it’s amazing reading, but it’s hard to tell conclusively what’s up with Empress.
The overall goal seems to be to slow down piracy in the initial launch period where they’re trying to get critical mass for sales. Eventually it looks like a good number of them get cracked, but by that time it’ll probably also be discounted on steam sales
Doesn’t make me want to buy it, without trying it out first, but saying hours to days for denuvo is…a joke really. Sure there were a couple of games that were cracked in a couple of days, but that’s a handful of them in the last 6 years or so. Most take a long, long time.
If a game I want to purchase has Denuvo, I just move on. It shows me that the game publisher doesn’t care as much about their users as they do their own profit. Plus, I also could just play another game that I already have.
Where I’m from, it’s legal to download cracked games so long as you’ve bought it legitimately. Paying for games isn’t a problem, it’s treating everyone as suspects that bugs me.
What happens if a publisher never releases a non-denuvo build, just withdraws it from the store after the denuvo contract ends? If their patent is to be believed, there is no way to run a game without information from the server, since tiny parts of the exe are removed and only sent when the ticket is requested, and no way to crack it after the fact.
Does the game just disappear if it was never cracked? How can somebody live with the fact that part of culture just disappeared, with the fact that a work of art just got lost forever because a corporation decided that profits were more important than maintaining a work of art?
The existence of DRM is reprehensible, it only facilitates the restriction of works of art for monetary gain. The growth of human civilization can be attributed in no small part to the free flow of information. Now that information is restricted, not to protect anybody, simply because corporations decided that preventing a tiny group of people from accessing that media without a paying the bridge troll was more important than allowing art to flow freely.
Does the game just disappear if it was never cracked?
Considering there are tons of games that are no longer supported, the answer is yes, the game customer is left to the elements when the publisher decides they’re done. And with the current DMCA, we’re not even legally allowed to break DRM for legal purposes (such as to play games we bought when the DRM is no longer supported.)
Curiously, it does send a message for the determined end user that legality is only for suckers (or for companies who have to operate within the constraints of licensing). Curiously, Windows 10 and 11 depend on the ignorance of upper management regarding the degree to which Microsoft has surveillance access, since companies don’t get to medium-sized without having a few skeletons in the accounting closet. I’m surprised so few companies haven’t switched to Linux Red Hat (which has a similar support package) but then Red Hat is going through its own scandals right now.
Anyway, if your game is popular, you can expect the old version to be supported until the redux comes out. If it’s a niche game produced by a company that the publisher bought a while ago and would like to forget, yes, it’ll disappear into the aether as you watch.
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Yea… sorry, I don’t believe in installing root-kits for playing games.
Especially, when most of the games I play are either single player, or co-op only.
Denuvo anti-tamper does not use rootkits.
I don’t know about you, but I see and them both as malware when installing any programs/games that might have either of them.
If there’s one way to make me instantly lose any semblance of respect I might have otherwise had for you, it’s to tell a blatant lie like this. I despise liars.
Of course it won’t show that. Because they’ll be cherry picked to not show that.
And I’ve seen Steam fanboys on the Steam forums who insist that the rumors of performance problems are baseless. They can go pleasure themselves with rusty cacti.
It’s not always about the performance impact…DRM has been known to restrict and prevent legitimate gamers from playing the games meanwhile those that sail the high seas ignore the useless DRM and continue to play.
I had a CD-burner that was wrecked by DRM, back when they were expensive.
preventing legitimate gamers from playing a game they bought in anyway is inexcusable to me. I dont even want to sign into your “social club” or download another launcher. If i have to put in one more address and password than necessary I’m much more likely to get an illegitimate copy.
Aside from failing to convince me, they have deepened my own conviction that sound cards are essential to maintaining decent framerates.
What do sound cards have to do with anything?
Yeah my thoughts exactly. I need an explanation
the people have a right to know!
Sound cards can literally save your performance when your frame rate is -30FPS
And since we’re talking Denuvo here, i thought it was on topic.
Why is this the case? Please elaborate.
Creative’s dedicated sound cards still make a difference when PCs struggle to sustain 30FPSon certain games, (and can help getting a stable 60FPS) on poorly optimized titles (or games that have been plagued by Denuvo).
Are you serious?
Now you got me wondering why this is the case…
I wonder if it’s just the drivers. Or something else, like the audio device name, or APOs.
Which game in particular did you have in mind?
I suspect it mainly has to do with the fact that Windows usually outputs uncompressed audio (due to requiring extra licencing for codecs like Dolby on a general-purpose PC, unlike consoles).
Because of that, a dedicated sound card will take that weight off the CPU.
In my case in particular, i noticed an 5-8FPS increase when playing AC:Revelations with my dedicated sound card (bear in mind, my CPU is merely a Core 2 Duo), but that’s because i still don’t have the money to upgrade my whole rig.
Back on topic, i saw a video by Anton’s Hardware that made a deep research on the topic, and while the conclusion was that, yes, on current games & hardware it didin’t make up much of a difference, it could be useful for specific cases, (in some poorly optimized games you can get better frames, and in well-optimized games can push FPS a bit further.
To finally end my comment, i’ll add a link to the video i just mentioned, along with one of the comments that i think demonstrates a “best case scenario” for the use of a sound card in current gaming.
https://youtu.be/aFy9jZzDSnY
This is an interesting watch.
Thanks for sharing!
I used to use sound cards myself ages ago for MIDI and DirectSound acceleration. I didn’t expect the hardware audio codecs to actually make a difference.
Nothing is stopping me from installing a PCIe Sound Blaster with a good old EMU chip. At least I hope so, the EMU10k1 and 20k1 have a hardware DMA bug which breaks them on systems with more than 2GB of memory lol
Not sure if I should go the CMedia route and just use Xonar instead. I do like Creative’s features (especially ALchemy), but those you can gain on any machine using a software suite made by Creative themselves.
As the video i linked demonstrates, Asus cards are slower than Creative cards, so i recommend Creative.
That being said, choose whatever you feel comfortable with. :)
How is their Linux driver support?
You got me there pal.
I mean i don’t remember having audio driver issues last time i used Ubuntu on my desktop PC (i think at the time i had an Audigy SE, now i have an X-Fi XtremeGamer).
You got me curious, i’ll try it as soon as i can and i’ll tell you back the results.
It’s not about the performance impact :|
You can’t. Don’t touch my kernal, scary man.
There’s so many games I haven’t bought simply because they used/ implemented Denuvo. I see Denuvo and it’s an instant lost sale/nonbuy.
Worse. Paradoxically, it encourages piracy.
Yup, I was going to grab Like a Dragon last week but saw Denuvo on the sidebar & quickly changed my mind.
Denuvo is at least understandable when it’s added to a game on launch to curb pirates for that crucial moment. But like a dragon has been cracked for over two years now, it has no business still having Denuvo.
If it has Denuvo it’s basically asking “please, get a pirated version if you want this, because the official version sucks”.
Cool. We still don’t want you.
The way I see it, it’s like if someone barged into my house and settled behind my ficus tree, telling me that I won’t notice them in my daily life. I don’t care how actually inconspicuous they are, I don’t want intruders under my roof period.
I wouldn’t say that it’s evil, but rather it doesn’t exist for the benefit of players, it exists for the benefit of corporations. They know that it hurts performance in games and prevents a lot of people from playing games that they’ve legitimately purchased, but so long as it’s preventing some piracy they do not care.
Scatter shot approach, they DGAF who gets caught up in the crossfire so long as it makes life harder for pirates
They don’t really care about the effect on pirates, it’s all about being able to sell the illusion of stopping piracy to suit wearing idiots.
Except it doesn’t prevent any piracy. Pirates strip the DRM away within hours or days, and then the game runs better for the pirates than the paying customers.
So, you have a small window of the game being “protected” but that’s the same window that people on the fence ab out the game wouldn’t have bought it anyway.
IT doesn’t need to be good at stopping piracy as long as it stops some piracy, or at least as long as they can sweet talk executives into believing it makes a difference.
Denovo isnt getting cracked in days. Sure Empress cracks it, but they are doing a handful of games per year. Most games with Denovo are years to never cracked.
Did you read the article?
It’s not hours to a few days.
The article is a puff piece about how the company behind Denuvo totally has data that says their root kit doesn’t negatively impact performance.
They assert this with the same sort of confidence that I had back in 3rd grade when I claimed to have a girlfriend, just one that went to a different school and no, you wouldn’t know her.
The interviewer completely ignores the massive amounts of 3rd party data that says, yes, Denuvo is cancer that makes games run like shit while also making it easier to hack people’s computers. Doesn’t bring it up at all.
Now for my part, I had to actually look to other sources to see what the current crack speed was, because I’m not going to trust a puff piece to be honest. I remember plenty of stories about how Denuvo was “uncrackable” and then cracked in literal hours.
Sadly, current crack speeds are much slower than they were just a couple years ago when I had last looked. Only one person is still bothering to crack Denuvo, and the company is constantly downloading the cracks and patching around them.
It’s not a puff piece, it’s an interview that clearly prefaced his comments with background info about Denuvos performance impact. You can disagree with it (I do) without discrediting the article. Also, as far as I know Denuvo games have always been slower to crack.
Been a while since I pirated games so idk just how out of the loop I am, but It looks to me that Denuvo games took longer because not a lot of people work on them. I could be wrong, of course, but Empress seems to crack them quickly.
Yeah but I believe people have to pay her and she’s kind of unstable too.
I agree on the point that Denuvo DRM negatively impacts performance but I’m not sure where you got the idea it can get stripped away. Very few games using Denuvo have been cracked, unfortunately it’s very good at its job.
I admit to being a bit out of the loop on new games/cracks. The last time I look was a couple of years back, when Denuvo was being cracked with zero day exploits.
So, looking it up now, there’s just one cracker left working Denuvo, and the company downloads the cracks themselves and reverse engineers them to make future cracking harder…
Quite the change in three years.
Anyone sane with the skillset has been hired to do similar work for an actual paycheck and no fear of jail
It is a difficult problem, but there have been a lot of cracked Denuvo games, even in this article, it mentions that about half of the released Denuvo games have been cracked out of a total of 127, that’s not a small amount.
It is true though that Denuvo is complex and there’s currently only one person who has been doing them for a bit and that person is presenting as very very mentally ill and may also be on a break… it’s amazing reading, but it’s hard to tell conclusively what’s up with Empress.
The overall goal seems to be to slow down piracy in the initial launch period where they’re trying to get critical mass for sales. Eventually it looks like a good number of them get cracked, but by that time it’ll probably also be discounted on steam sales
Meanwhile, 162 days and counting for dead space.
Doesn’t make me want to buy it, without trying it out first, but saying hours to days for denuvo is…a joke really. Sure there were a couple of games that were cracked in a couple of days, but that’s a handful of them in the last 6 years or so. Most take a long, long time.
Well, they’re going to have to try a lot harder to convince me. In fact I don’t think it’s possible for me to see Denuvo as anything but malware.
If a game I want to purchase has Denuvo, I just move on. It shows me that the game publisher doesn’t care as much about their users as they do their own profit. Plus, I also could just play another game that I already have.
Where I’m from, it’s legal to download cracked games so long as you’ve bought it legitimately. Paying for games isn’t a problem, it’s treating everyone as suspects that bugs me.
What happens if a publisher never releases a non-denuvo build, just withdraws it from the store after the denuvo contract ends? If their patent is to be believed, there is no way to run a game without information from the server, since tiny parts of the exe are removed and only sent when the ticket is requested, and no way to crack it after the fact. Does the game just disappear if it was never cracked? How can somebody live with the fact that part of culture just disappeared, with the fact that a work of art just got lost forever because a corporation decided that profits were more important than maintaining a work of art? The existence of DRM is reprehensible, it only facilitates the restriction of works of art for monetary gain. The growth of human civilization can be attributed in no small part to the free flow of information. Now that information is restricted, not to protect anybody, simply because corporations decided that preventing a tiny group of people from accessing that media without a paying the bridge troll was more important than allowing art to flow freely.
Does the game just disappear if it was never cracked?
Considering there are tons of games that are no longer supported, the answer is yes, the game customer is left to the elements when the publisher decides they’re done. And with the current DMCA, we’re not even legally allowed to break DRM for legal purposes (such as to play games we bought when the DRM is no longer supported.)
Curiously, it does send a message for the determined end user that legality is only for suckers (or for companies who have to operate within the constraints of licensing). Curiously, Windows 10 and 11 depend on the ignorance of upper management regarding the degree to which Microsoft has surveillance access, since companies don’t get to medium-sized without having a few skeletons in the accounting closet. I’m surprised so few companies haven’t switched to Linux Red Hat (which has a similar support package) but then Red Hat is going through its own scandals right now.
Anyway, if your game is popular, you can expect the old version to be supported until the redux comes out. If it’s a niche game produced by a company that the publisher bought a while ago and would like to forget, yes, it’ll disappear into the aether as you watch.
That company could literally cure every type of cancer and I still wouldn’t support a single thing they do.
They’d probably try to license out their cancer cure and put DRM on it so only the licensed company can synthesize the cure lol