Over the weekend, a story began spreading about a ‘cracked’ version of Resident Evil Village which, with the DRM software removed, runs better than the version on Steam. The tech team at Digital Foundry then put that claim to the test and confirmed that, yes, the pirated version does not stutter like the official version.
You can watch DF’s analysis above, and here’s a summary of the findings, but the long-and-short of it is that, while the differences are relatively minor, regular DRM checks appeared to be causing frame stutters: particularly during combat when blows strike enemies.
The culprits in this case look to be the supervillain team-up of Capcom’s in-house DRM alongside our old friend Denuvo, which claims it delivers DRM “with zero-impact on the gaming experience.” Well well well! In fairness it is hard to point the finger at one or the other, though unless the cracker was also fixing bugs while removing DRM then they have some sort of finger in the frame-stuttering pie.
And Capcom’s now basically admitted it, and said a fix is on the way. It told us yesterday the company was “currently looking into the reported PC performance issues” before sending over a follow-up statement to Eurogamer confirming that “The team are working on a patch to address PC performance issues, it should be available soon—we’ll have more details shortly.”
Bit embarrassing, innit. It’s not been a red-letter day for Capcom or Resident Evil in general: as well as this, today saw the announcement that the spin-off RE: Verse has been delayed, yet again, and Capcom won’t commit to anything beyond ‘2022’.