It can, but that seems to be more related to poor implementations by the game devs, and not inherent to it. There are plenty of examples of games with Denuvo that still run fine (give or take your opinion on whether the presence of DRM is inherently "impacted performance").
More modern version: No you are holding your iPhone wrong, it is not a design fault that makes a ground loop in the antenna if you hold two metal surfaces with your hands.
Isn't Denuvo actually implemented in a game by the DRM developers, though? I remember reading that they have a process where the game dev sends Denuvo an unprotected executable, who adds the DRM to that executable and sends it back.
Thus, I believe the poor implementations are directly the fault of Denuvo.
The games run terribly on release because they have Denuvo, and then when the sales volume no longer justifies the licensing costs of Denuvo, the devs strip it out and sell it to the players in patch notes as "optimizing performance."
Someone else mentioned GTA getting more aggressive copy protection out of nowhere. It's not out of nowhere. With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection.
Denuvo has layers upon layers of obfuscation that inflates nearly every instruction and function call, extra code execution that does nothing to throw off someone trying to follow code execution paths, and constant moving around where the game stores stuff in memory, again, to throw someone off watching via debugger.
It's pathetic because one company has been almost entirely responsible for people needing to buy faster and faster CPUs and GPUs trying to eek out more and more performance. CPUs, GPUs, memory - all of it has gotten enormously faster, we have more cores, etc. Despite all that, every new game barely runs at 60fps.
Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
> With GTA6 ads out for a while, sales of GTA5 are up as people either play it for the first time or replay it. Sales going up means they can justify copy protection
How does that justify it? Adding stronger DRM when cracked copies of the same content are already out there is like trying to get insurance after your house has already burnt down.
> Do you really believe that year after year game developers and game engines get worse and worse at performance? Of course not.
If you strictly want to blame Denuvo then that assumes game developers cannot think of a way to spend their extra performance either. Which is obviously not the case.
False. There's lots of side-by-side recordings of Denuvo and non-Denuvo versions of games on YouTube clearly showing that Denuvo does impact performance.
No there aren't, because having identical builds of games with Denuvo actually removed and present is vanishingly rare.
If you compare a game that's had significant performance patches over a period of years and had Denuvo removed to the launch version (as so many of these videos are) then no shit you see performance differences, but it doesn't tell you anything.
Should be noted that even scene cracks don't fully remove denuvo and all the performance intense checks so the impact should be even larger on actually denuvo free versions.