A new crack for the PC version of Resident Evil Village seems to solve the performance problems that occur when killing zombies, for example. The crackmaker states that developer Capcom and Denuvo’s copy protections were the problem.
“Any ingame stutters like killing a zombie have been fixed as Capcom’s entry points have been removed so most of their functions never run again,” crackmaker Empress says in the crack’s .nfo. “What makes it even worse is that Capcom’s DRM was completely hidden in Denuvo’s VM, which slowed things down even more.”
The stuttering issues were fixed around the time of release raised by Digital Foundry, among others, who explained it in a video. They also indicate that serious performance problems occur when the player encounters the witches, who are surrounded by a swarm of bats. Those performance issues also seem to have been resolved.
Several parties have put it to the test and claim that the crack does indeed improve performance. Those are both channels on YouTube, as John Papadopoulos from Dark Side of Gaming.
Crack does seem to introduce another problem
A downside of the crack seems to be that certain animations, where the DRM presumably performs its checks, seem to have been completely removed. Commenters on a piracy website point to a other comparison video where one of the witches still grabs the player character in all sorts of ways in the regular version and mainly stares at the player in the cracked version. It is not known how many animations are missing. Please note that the performance in that video cannot simply be compared because the video maker uses two different GPU driver versions.
That Denuvo and other copy protections negatively affect the performance of the games they protect is nothing new. An extensive benchmark session from the YouTube channel Overlord Gaming, for example, already showed this in 2018.
That channel also noted that a crack won’t necessarily improve a game’s performance, while a developer’s own removal of Denuvo has a much higher chance of doing so. Resident Evil Village and the Empress crack seem to be the exception, with the catch being the missing animations. Perhaps now that the crack is there, Capcom will remove the copy protection itself, which happens more often with Denuvo.
Update, Wednesday, July 14: Digital Foundry has one video dedicated to the situation. They confirm that the crack fixes the performance issues and state that using RE Frameworka mod framework for this game, among others, can help bring back missing animations.