The pirate version of Final Fantasy XV is faster than the Steam version with Denuvo

The other day there was information that the version of the game Final Fantasy XV, which is devoid of any protection, that is, "pirated", works faster than the same game, purchased and downloaded on Steam. In order to prove this statement, the enthusiasts conducted a whole group of tests and showed that this is the case.

The system, which was tested during the tests, has the following characteristics: Intel i7 4930K processor, overclocked to 4.2 GHz, 8 GB of RAM, NVIDIA GTX980Ti graphics adapter, Windows 10 64-bit OS. Drivers for the video card are loaded latest. Both the pirated and Steam versions are installed on the hard disk.


Game Settings

The first results were already visible at the start of the game. The pirate version loaded faster than the Steam version with Denuvo. It took the pirate about 3 seconds to start up the first time, while the licensed copy hardly booted in half a minute. The restart took about 8 seconds from the Steam version, while the pirated version was loaded again in 3 seconds. Of course, this is not so much, but we are comparing the download speeds of two different versions of the same game. And the difference is just striking.
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In the pirated version, even game cards loaded much faster - 58 seconds versus 1 minute and 40 seconds for the licensed version. Below you can see the video with the test results.


The legal version, among other things, sometimes also crashes. This does not happen so often, and it is not always possible to notice, but the problem exists. The reason was found out after studying the processes. As it turned out, Steam for some reason all the time accesses the hard drive, which leads to slight delays in the process. Of course, SSD owners may not notice anything. However, the slower operation of the game on the HDD, and the game is licensed, raises questions.



As for performance measurements, the test was carried out at a resolution of 1280 * 720 pixels at the highest settings, but without the effects of NVIDIA Gameworks. In this case, both versions of the game proved to be almost the same.



True, everything changed after the resolution was raised to 1080p and the main character was released “to the field”, that is, to the maximum open location with a large number of landscape details.

In this case, the pirated version showed itself much better - there were no “brakes”, unlike the licensed version. And the further the gamer went through the game, the worse the Steam version showed itself. For example, after 10 minutes of the game, the frame rate (fps) was reduced to 60. But if you just restart the chapter, it turned out to go 75 fps. And this was relevant only in relation to the Steam-version, the pirate did not suffer from such problems. Even after an hour of play, performance did not decline.

Interestingly, after a while Square Enix released a patch, which, however, did not solve any of the above problems. All questions about the performance of a legal copy remain valid now.



At the time of its appearance, the protection of games Denuvo was very reliable. She entered the market about four years ago, and then positioned her developer, Denuvo Software Solutions GmbH, as the most reliable. Protection allows you to cover such weaknesses as reverse engineering of executable files, debugging and making changes. Plus Denuvo does not require a permanent connection to the network, there is no limit on the number of activations of new equipment, and you can play on any platform where the title is installed.

By the way, Denuvo does not fully protect the game from hacking. Once it was a very serious obstacle for those who wanted to put a protected game "in people". But at the end of last year, South Park: The Fractured but Whole with Denuvo was hacked in just one day. This kind of protection is becoming less and less effective, there is even an opinion that the games will soon cease to be defended, because it is meaningless. True, the developers of Denuvo are also not idle. They are trying to improve and update the methods of DRM-protection. Maybe a new version will soon appear, which will be better protected from hacking than the previous ones.