Assassin’s Creed Origins punishes paying customers; Denuvo + VMProtect = disastrous performance
Ubisoft adds VMProtect along with Denuvo to protect Assassin’s Creed Origins from pirates, but ends up penalizing paying customers with lousy performance even on decent hardware.
A game you need to pirate to run?
Ubisoft’s latest title in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, AC Origins, comes with Denuvo. Now, Denuvo is not a new name anymore in the PC gaming industry and publishers has shown that DRM protection is not necessary to sell millions of copies of a well-written game. However Ubisoft, in all of their wisdom, decided to add VMProtect to Denuvo for better protection from pirates.
It wouldn’t be an issue if it ran nicely in the background without sucking up too much resources, but apparently the latter is not true. According to Voksi, who has recently cracked Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus before it was launched, Denuvo and VMProtect has a 30-40% hit on the performance in AC Origins.
Not only is Ubisoft wanting you to pay for the game, it seems that you will have to upgrade to a more recent CPU like the AMD’s Ryzen and Intel’s Coffee Lake to run the game smoothly. Users running an Intel Core i5 4590 and i7 4790K are complaining of 100% CPU loads and FPS drops. Some users are even suffering from BSODs due to the excessive CPU load.
On the bright side, the game that you have paid for is a lot more resistant to crackers now. VMProtect’s layer makes Denuvo a lot harder to trace and crack. It’s a pity that Ubisoft decided to use such a CPU-taxing DRM protection for their latest game. I guess it’s really past the prime of quad core CPUs?
Source: TorrentFreak
Pokdepinion: I am not sure if Ubisoft will try to optimize their DRM protection or just advise gamers to upgrade to a faster CPU. In any case, this is a bad precedent for upcoming DRM-protected games.
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