The cracked version of Resident Evil Village runs better, testing confirms

An interesting claim appeared over the weekend: that a cracked version of Resident Evil Village not only bypasses Capcom's DRM, but runs better than the Steam version. The tech reporters at Digital Foundry put that claim to the test, comparing Resident Evil Village's normal and cracked versions, and what do you know, it's true: The pirated version doesn't stutter like the retail version, Digital Foundry says.

For the most part, the two executables perform identically, as DF's Rich Leadbetter explains in the video embedded above. To be clear, the cracked version does not deliver an overall frame rate increase. At certain moments, however, the time it takes to render a frame suddenly spikes in the retail version, causing a noticeable pause, or a stutter. Digital Foundry shows that this stuttering does not happen at all in the cracked version, suggesting that DRM processes are occasionally interfering with Resident Evil Village's ability to render new frames. 

The inconsistency looks particularly annoying in combat: In its video, DF shows the screen momentarily halting the moment an enemy is hit. The site says that the same issue does not appear in the console versions.

The claim that PC DRM solutions hamper game performance is common, but it's usually tricky to prove, because we don't get many opportunities to test game executables that are identical outside of one including DRM and the other not. In this case, we don't know all the variables: DRM may not be the only difference between the retail and cracked copies of Village. As Leadbetter points out, though, if DRM is not to blame for the stuttering, the only remaining conclusion is that the cracked version both bypasses the DRM and fixes a performance issue unrelated to DRM. That's possible, but I think it's safe for us to reject 'oops, accidentally fixed the stuttering' as the explanation here (and it doesn't really reflect better on the game).

Anti-tampering technology Denuvo, which advertises "zero-impact on the gaming experience," is often the target of DRM performance hit accusations. In a 2016 test, we found that Denuvo DRM did not affect performance in Final Fantasy 15, but others have recorded apparent Denuvo-related performance hits in different games, such as Devil May Cry 5. This case doesn't resolve the Denuvo question, because while the cracker says that Denuvo is used in Resident Evil Village, Capcom's own DRM technology is apparently at play, too, and could be the main contributor to the stuttering problem.

I've contacted both Capcom and Irdeto, the company behind Denuvo, for comment, but haven't heard back as of yet. 

Some good news, perhaps, is that aspects of Resident Evil Village's DRM will likely be removed in the future. Capcom hasn't said as much, but it's something the company does: It patched Denuvo out of Devil May Cry 5 about a year after release, and dropped it from Resident Evil 7 two years after release.