Cracked Version Of Resident Evil Village Has Better PC Performance, Update Coming

Update: Capcom is now planning to patch Resident Evil Village on PC to address performance issues, but it remains to be seen how this will compare to the cracked version.

Original story follows...

Following indications that the cracked version of Resident Evil Village on PC was offering players a better experience than paying customers, a report into the issue has proved that the removal of DRM from the game drastically improves overall performance.

Digital Foundry conducted tests on both the retail and cracked versions of Capcom's latest sequel, coming away with the conclusion that the game's anti-piracy features are currently behind the poor performance of the game on PC. Since launch, Resident Evil Village has exhibited issues with frametimes, causing large stutters during normal gameplay sequences such as shooting. The issues are worse in certain scenarios, such as the early encounter with Lady Dimitrescu's daughters, which can plummet the frame rate from the high 100s all the way down to the low 30s.

The cracked version of the game exhibits none of these issues, and even cleans up many of the minor, but irritating stutters that the game throws at players frequently. According to information gathered by Digital Foundry, the community behind the crack has indicated that this is down to Capcom's additional work on top of the base that Denuvo, the DRM software implemented in Village, offers. The community members suggest that the game is also making unnecessary calls to your PC for information, as well as redundant Steam API calls as players progress certain achievements.

The crack removes both Denuvo and the reliance on Steam, so what exactly is at fault is a little difficult to pinpoint right now. These are issues that have persisted since the game's launch in April, however, with Capcom having failed to release a single patch for the game on PC since.

It's a puzzling scenario given the game's exceptional performance across consoles, even with the demanding ray tracing suite enabled. But if you're still playing on PC, this might give you peace of mind that it's not your hardware at fault.