Benchmarked: The performance impact of Denuvo DRM

A lot of gamers believe that DRM such as Denuvo significantly hurts game performance. Game publishers are quick to downplay this but now there's a YouTube clip from Overlord that investigates the matter. Overlord tested seven games before and after they officially removed Denuvo DRM via a patch, this includes Hitman, Abzu, Sherlock Holmes the Devil's Daughter, Mad Max, Agents of Mayhem, Sniper Ghost Warrior 3, and Mass Effect: Andromeda.

To test the impact on CPU performance, Overlord tested the games on an Intel Core i7 2600K in combination with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

The conclusion is pretty interesting, some games see a massive difference in performance, while others barely show a difference. Titles like Hitman and Abzu do not show a performance gain with Denuvo removed, while games like Mass Effect: Andromeda and Mad Max show a difference in excess of 10 percent. In case of Mass Effect, the minimum FPS jumps from 46fps with Denuvo to 67fps without the DRM!