Does Denuvo have a performance impact in Final Fantasy XV?

Denuvo has gained a bad reputation over the years, with the most frequent criticism being its rumoured performance hit, receiving constant bashing almost every time a demanding PC game hits the market. The problem with this criticism is that it is unproven, with no conclusive data to back it up, though Final Fantasy XV has given PC gamers the opportunity to finally put this issue to bed. 

Peter “Durante” Thoman, the creator of the Dark Souls mod DSFix and the man who created the performance-enhancing MEGAPATCH for Little King Story’s PC version, has dedicated some of his time to specifically test the effects of Denuvo on Final Fantasy XV. In this effort he used the game’s DRM free demo and the Denuvo using final release to test several like for like scenarios. 

Denuvo is most commonly said to increase the CPU demands of a PC game, so Durante tested the game with a resolution of 720p with a 50% rendering scale with a GTX 1080 GPU to ensure that his processor was as heavily loaded as possible. The game was tested with its highest GPU preset with all GameWorks effects disabled aside from Turf Effects, maximising CPU load with a large number of draw calls.  

Below is a graph which details one of three of Durante’s test scenes, which compare various core counts on his i7 5820K, allowing the Denuvo using final game to be compared against the Denuvo free demo. Across three scenes the full game performed slightly better (5.6% faster) in one, identical in another and 3.5% slower in the final test area. In short, game performance was not affected, with differences that can better be attributed to a margin of error or slight differences between the demo and final game than Denuvo.