Developer hacks Denuvo DRM after six months of detective work and 2,000 hooks, allows running Hogwarts Legacy on other PCs

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 146 points –
Developer hacks Denuvo DRM after six months of detective work and 2,000 hooks, allows running Hogwarts Legacy on other PCs
tomshardware.com
9

"He discovered that the amount of Denuvo code executed in-game is quite infrequent, with calls occurring once every few seconds, or during level loads. This suggests that Denuvo is not killing performance, contrary to popular belief. "

No, it might suggest that this version of Denuvo and the way that this developer implemented it might not be affecting performance.

However, "every few seconds" is actually quite a lot, and if it causes a stutter each time, it's brutal on perceived framerate. So no, it doesn't actually suggest that Denuvo isn't killing performance. It's actually making it pretty obvious that it can easily affect performance.

Woohoo, so the number of people that can crack Denuvo is now up to three, right? Two if you only count recent iterations.

This guy is a DRM developer and he experienced frequent crashes and instability after bypassing Denuvo so he's not going to be the next Empress unfortunately

Who are the others? Empress is one, and the other?

I think football manager or some other sports game uses an outdated version of Denuvo and is more easily cracked. I guess they have to crack it often for DLC or updates. I don't really know.

Thanks, I though you meant the latest version of Denuvo

Kind of bad news, because this guy stopped just when he knew he was cappable of bypassing it.

It really seems you have to be that kind of crazy (Empress kind of crazy) to actually complete the task to the point to make a game functional, so kind of bummer.

A DRM developer says DRM protection does not hamper gaming performance. Okay, nothing weird here.

Fuck denuvo, the only good thing about denuvo is that eventually the devs get tired of paying for it.

Denuvo is a cache defeat mechanism. Of course it kills performance. If CPUs still worked like 386s and 68000s, then having eight copies of every function and bouncing merrily between them would make no difference. But modern processors are only fast because they spend negligible time waiting for RAM to get its act together. Every squandered microsecond is a thousand cycles burned.