Specifically, he wanted to see if he could prove that Denuvo kills performance as much as many people believe.

This can be done without cracking it. There have been several games that have removed this DRM, as well as some who have added it post-publication. Benchmarks between versions should highlight the performance issues.

Also, fuck Denuvo.

"He discovered that the amount of Denuvo code executed in-game is quite infrequent, with calls occurring once every few seconds, or during level loads. This suggests that Denuvo is not killing performance, contrary to popular belief. "

No, it might suggest that this version of Denuvo and the way that this developer implemented it might not be affecting performance.

However, “every few seconds” is actually quite a lot, and if it causes a stutter each time, it’s brutal on perceived framerate. So no, it doesn’t actually suggest that Denuvo isn’t killing performance. It’s actually making it pretty obvious that it can easily affect performance.

A DRM developer says DRM protection does not hamper gaming performance. Okay, nothing weird here.

Fuck denuvo, the only good thing about denuvo is that eventually the devs get tired of paying for it.

Denuvo is a cache defeat mechanism. Of course it kills performance. If CPUs still worked like 386s and 68000s, then having eight copies of every function and bouncing merrily between them would make no difference. But modern processors are only fast because they spend negligible time waiting for RAM to get its act together. Every squandered microsecond is a thousand cycles burned.

🤮