[TiredOfLife]

Keep in mind that modern games generate/compile shader and other caches during runtime, that is one of the reasons for stutter. So when they try version with the drm removed the cache is already generated and so there are no stutters

[smcl]

Shader compilation is well known though, and anyone halfway serious about benchmarking these things (like Digital Foundry) factor this in and control for it

[TiredOfLife]

Yes, and anyone halfway serious including DF usually don't find Denuvo having any noticeable effect on performance

[badsectoracula]

DF's claims isn't that it doesn't have any noticeable effect in performance (in fact in a recent video[0] they claim the opposite when Denuvo was introduced to Assassin's Creed Mirage after reviews were done - it can affect performance and thus because of that introducing it after the fact invalidated the CPU performance metrics reviewers had done) but - at least in the cases i remember - they cannot tell if the issues were due to Denuvo or not.

Note though that in a case where they could test both versions, they did find Denuvo to both have lesser performance and affect frame pacing[1] (though that is for a 2yo game, things might be better more recently).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LB1lRC4II4

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXZGCwAJpbM

[badsectoracula]

That'd be the case with any update, not just the one that removes Denuvo though.