Tomb Raider Runs Up to 30 FPS Faster Without Denuvo DRM

Proving digital-rights management can come with a major performance hit to PC games.

Some PC games use anti-tamper tech to help prevent piracy, but it can come with a serious performance hit as Shadow of the Tomb Raider has just revealed.

As DSOG reports, last week Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics decided to remove Denuvo's digital-rights management (DRM) and anti-tamper technology from Shadow of the Tomb Raider on PC. The update on Steam also added an improved shadow denoiser, upgraded Nvidia DLSS, and multiplayer updates, but no CPU or memory performance improvements were noted.

For some reason, publisher Square Enix rolled back the update, but DSOG managed to download and benchmark the Steam version of the game with Denuvo removed. They used a PC running a Core i9 9900K,16GB of DDR4 RAM (3,600Mhz), a GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card, and Windows 10 64-bit. What they discovered was a significant performance improvement.

At the highest settings running at 1080p there was a small improvement in performance, but switching to Lowest settings saw the frame rate jump by between 8-17 fps compared to the Denuvo-protected version. On older CPUs the performance improvement should be even higher, and if Hyper-Threading is disabled, the difference between the two versions jumped as high as 30 fps.

If you're running a fairly new gaming PC then removing Denuvo will offer a slight performance gain, but for anyone wishing to play the latest games using an older PC, Denuvo could make the difference between a game being playable or not. At least, that's what these benchmarks suggest.

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