[GuB-42]

Accurate emulation is extremely hard, even for ancient hardware. See this article from 2011 for example: https://arstechnica.netblogpro.com/gaming/2011/08/accuracy-t... It takes a 3 GHz CPU to emulate the SNES accurately. You can do with less, obviously, but you will notice differences in some games.

With modern hardware, I don't think perfectly accurate emulation will ever be possible. We don't have that for the PS2 and XBox, maybe on the original PlayStation, but I am not even sure. Emulators for modern systems are all high level, emulating API calls instead of the hardware.

[Retr0id]

If denuvo does anything that actually requires cycle-accurate emulation, I'll eat my hat.

Modern hardware is easier to emulate "accurately", simply because the real hardware does not behave as consistently as, say, a 6502 core. DRAM and cache latency are variable, and the core/bus frequencies are scaling up and down all the time. Furthermore, the coupling between the CPU and GPU is more asynchronous than it used to be.

Your emulator doesn't have to hit any specific timings, becaure there aren't any - it just has to be within some range of plausibility.

I wouldn't be surprised if denuvo does make use of timing to some extent, but it won't need cycle-accurate emulation to defeat, just fudging the numbers to get close enough.