As we’ve already showcased, Denuvo can actually decrease the performance in games that are CPU-bound. On the other hand, this anti-tamper tech has no meaningful performance hit in games that are GPU-bound. And yesterday, YouTube’s ‘Overlord’ a pretty informative video in which they benchmarked seven games with and without the Denuvo anti-tamper tech.
The games that Overlord tested were: Hitman, Abzu, Sherlock Holmes the Devil’s Daughter, Mass Effect Andromeda, Mad Max, Agents of Mayhem and Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3.
From these games, Mad Max, Mass Effect Andromeda and Sherlock Holmes the Devil’s Daughter saw noticeable performance improvements when Denuvo was removed. Agents of Mayhem saw a very small performance boost, whereas Hitman, Abzu and Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 did not see any performance improvement when the controversial anti-tamper tech was removed.
Out of all the aforementioned tests, we were a bit surprised by the Agents of Mayhem results. Since the game appeared to be CPU-limited, we were expecting a noticeable performance boost so we may test this game ourselves in the future.
On the other hand, we were not surprised at all with the results for Hitman, Abzu and Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3. After all, these three games were stressing our GTX980Ti to the max, so they can be easily described as GPU-bound titles.
We were also not surprised by the performance improvements in Sherlock Holmes the Devil’s Daughter, Mad Max and Mass Effect: Andromeda. These three games use engines that favour multiple CPU threads (Unreal Engine, Apex Engine and Frostbite 3 Engine) so it was only natural to see a performance boost once Denuvo was removed.
Overall, Overlord’s results fall in line with everything we’ve been saying these past few months. In CPU-bound games, Denuvo can bring an additional performance hit (and it would be really great if Ubisoft removed Denuvo from Assassin’s Creed Origins so we can test it). However, in games that rely heavily on the GPU, Denuvo does not really have any impact on the game’s performance!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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