Denuvo DRM (Dragon Age, FIFA 15) possibly damaging to SSDs

source: http://gamemag.ru/news/drm-zashchita-dragon-ageinquisition-denuvo-antitamper-ubivaet-ssdhdd-101753

And a rough translation and synopsis from a Russian speaker:

Want to know how many times the average of the code LoF.exe (Lords of The Fallen) being transferred from HDD to memory and back in one hour? 150,000 operations of copy-write. This is 10,000 times greater than normal. DRM continuously decodes the game code into memory and encrypts it back. This is one of the most retarded use of encryption techniques which I have ever seen. Despite the fact that the small pieces of code (maximum 2 kilobytes per entry), are stored in one memory block. Playing the game for 4-8 hours (depending on the quality SSD) means that memory block will be gone forever.

If this is true, this is extroardinarily bad for users playing Denuvo-protected games off of an SSD. The one thing you really do not ever want to do with an SSD is constantly rewrite data since NAND flash has a finite life expectancy.

Once again, gamers who legitimately buy their games are being screwed over by DRM and when the pirates crack Denuvo (and they will - it's been cracked before), they won't have to worry about it at all. Nice job, Denuvo.

Hopefully now that this article is out in Russia and beginning to circulate in the West, it will be confirmed by another party such as PC Gamer, Eurogamer, or RPS. With Dragon Age: Inquisition being as long of a game as it is, I'm not sure I want to risk putting my host SSD through 10,000 times greater stress than normal.

So performance for a non SSD would be terrible than?

Unless there is data and source backing this up I'm not 100% convince especially from a Russian forum users

Might have to start setting sail on the high seas at this rate.

THHBO

DRM is never a good solution . Too bad these game devs keep going back to 2005 and 2009 days , even though their methods have been been proven wrong for many time already .

I haven't heard anybody complain about issues with their SSD for FIFA 15 and its been out for quite a while.

Oh god I hope so, Denuvo getting the tits sued off them would be hilarious.

Hohoho, I knew they would **** up.

It's not like anyone is playing FIFA 15 on a PC.

@True_Gamer_ apparently is maybe we can ask him

wishful thinking

SecuROM blew up my DVD-ROM drive. Since then I've been wholeheartedly against DRM.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but all new SSD have wear leveling right? So this would be a non issue unless it is writing gigabytes of data. I don't even think it's possible to write to the same memory address over and over, I don't think even the OS has that level of control.

@ten_pints: It actually is writing gigabytes of data according to this source, approximately 1gb/minute. That is exceeding the recommended daily write endurance levels in 50 minutes of gameplay on Intel SSDs.

Writing 1GB/min does not seem right to me, that would majorly interfere with load times.

They may get a small influx in early sales until the DRM is eventually cracked but they loose a lot of respect from their customers. All DRM ever seems to do is turn honest buyers into disgruntled pirates. DRM only makes the problem worse and they will never learn.

Luckily it's only bad games that use it so far. I hope it doesn't spread.

Not on an SSD, that is nothing really compared to overall throughput capability. The SSD in my machine writes at like 550 megabytes per second, and there are way faster ones.

You are assuming everyone has SSD, I don't.

Exactly ... isn't Russia and the Ukraine the Pirate capital of the world? Take whatever they say with a grain of salt....as they are just salty over not cracking this...lol.

That shit included with Spore was the reason I had to reinstall Windows, throw the game in the trash, and vow to never give EA another dime again.

This topic is mainly about SSDs...it's right in the thread title and all over the OP and in the article. What in the world are you even talking about dude? Even platter drives have no problem writing that amount of data without a performance hit if that is what you're going on about. You wouldn't even notice it, a minute is a fucking eternity to write 1gb.

so appropriate for his username lol.

Hopefully this gets confirmed or debunked soon.

I have almost 100 hours of FIFA 15 on PC and I haven't noticed anything wrong.

Just a question, and I am genuinely asking because I don't know the answer, but what's to stop me from plugging in an external, non solid state drive, installing Dragon Age to it, and playing the game off of it? In that case I don't need to worry about stress on my SSD, right? Or is there some other negative fallout that I am missing? Would the game run slower or worse on a regular HDD because of the constant need for writing/re-writing, for example?

@charizard1605: you technically could do that in a number of different ways, even if Origin didn't permit installation to an external device. For instance you could just use symlinks or junctions (a file or directory shortcut/redirect) to point the program from the original installation directory over to your external. The quality of the experience would depend on the type of device, the link speed (USB 3.0 or whatever) and the type of game you were playing. For instance a big open world game like GTA that is constantly streaming the world in as you're playing may not be as great of an experience as a corridor shooter where the entire level is just loaded into RAM when you start it.

If this article is to be believed, then the constant reading and writing of the protection would use up a significant amount of bandwidth even on a USB 3.0 link. Thunderbolt may be better, but you would have to check with the four people who own Thunderbolt external drives on that one.

(On Symbolic Links - anyone who has used Stefan Jones' SteamTool has used symlinks. SteamTool is more or less just a GUI for symlinks. This was more of a big deal back when Steam only permitted installation of games to the same hard drive that the Steam client was installed on, but it is still useful for SSD management today. Basically the idea is that you install your games to the default drive, then use SteamTool to move them to another drive of your choice. SteamTool then creates a symlink (or junction) so the Steam client still thinks your game is installed in the default directory. In reality, only a "shortcut" is there and the files have all been relocated elsewhere, but the program doesn't know that. Steam only knows that it looked for the files in the expected location and found them. A word of warning though, be careful with symlinks and junctions especially if you're creating them from the command line. One wrong move and you can wipe out entire directories, or you could end up creating infinite loops that can cause your file system to freak out. Ok tangent over!)

SSDs can write 6Gb/s for months on end before failing. I think 1/gb of minute shouldn't be too awful, but it's definitely not preferable.

Nothing wrong with DRM; just annoyed prolific thief's wanting free bread.

Shocking.

There is a guy who is still running a Samsung 830 copying terrabytes of data back to worth to it and its still showing no signs of wear.

Still cant answer my question though....

@darthramms

No problem with FIFA I play it for 50 hours...

Its not gamers that make the cracks..... Gamers are just in it for a free game.

My freind, it has been explained now; numerous times, criminals are best suited to a prison cell. Preferably Russian.

Attempting to falsely use human-rights as a shield mocks people who actually care about them; such as the monk who set himself on fire.

In many ways; you (you) cheapen the definition of "human rights".

Human rights? Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

If you had a choice what would you choose?

1. Someone to pirate your money?

2. Someone to STEAL your money?

In the scenario you are hungry and need food.

A jail cell. Poverty is not an excuse for criminality; as Liam Neeson pointed out: criminals thrive on society's "understanding".

A prime example would be this forum. How many times has a herioc moderator moderated someone only for threads to be created claiming "misunderstanding" and "misjustice"? This is typical criminal behavior: used for millions of years.

Get off your high horse. Your moral justice crusader stance is disgusting.

Cutting through the facade; paper ideals used in attempts to justify piracy is akin to threatening feminists with sex and death; it's criminality under the disguise of respectability and legitimacy.

Being counter to this overwhelming rabble (because it operates as a self-serving delusions) creates balance as well as a much required voice of reason in the face of overwhelming disdain. If Marin Luther King was alive; chances are he would be on my side of the fence as he himself would understand better than anyone.

@uninspiredcup: Since when was I justifying piracy? Also, you claim its criminality disguised as legitimacy, why have you not gone after all those bankers and CEO's that swindled taxpayers by fiddling the books? As I said, get off your high horse. No one in life is perfect, life is a very dirty game yes but you can't change that.

I have. The people just down the road to me use to smoke the drugs. Everyone in the street was scared of them. Having simply acted; phoned up the police, they are now no longer a problem. Anyone; no matter how small can make a change.

Likewise: Regardless of pc's overwhelming piracy and the grand delusions they entail, I constantly attempt to inject reality when required. Ultimately it has and continues to hurt pc gaming. Criminals hijack a hippy like point of view of "us" against "the man" as an incredibly poor attempt at legitimatize for what amounts to "I steal because I can get away with it".

Now that we have an anti-piracy measure that seems to work; without effecting the game negatively in a major manner. The pc gamers and now trying there absolute hardest to wrap around any narrative they can; even a hint of it, as a means of justifying going against it, enforcing the concept "it must be stolen".

It's really quite scummy in all honesty and makes the supposed "master race" appear anything but.

Still avoiding to answer the simple question:

SOMEONE Stealing or pirating your money will have the same effect on your life?

If SOMEONE ELSE steals your money...or pirates it. Not you.

All these amazing vocabulary that you employ with such grandeur!!! And still fear to confront me in a reasonable and actually constructive debate?

Nice. Looks like I will not be buying this until I confirm whether the DRM is harmful or not.

Your argument with uninspired_cup reminds me of an argument I had with Grammaton_Cleric years back. He was bullying a user who said that he preferred older games to newer ones. I stepped up to defend the user; I said it's okay for the user to say that he prefers old games because it's subjective. But GC kept up with the verbosity all the while and started slamming me with post after post saying that he had "proof" that newer games were better and even asked me to post my "thesis" as to why I disagree with him. Little suck ups started posting, "dude you pwned him. wow". Long story short : GC's tirade ended up humiliating me because people were more impressed with his verbosity rather than the simple truth - whether old games or new ones are better is purely subjective. He also made the user stop gaming. I'm not joking; the user actually stopped.

Anyways, back on topic - DRM sucks. It's that simple. There is no need to penalize legitimate owners because of piracy. Developers risk alienating their existing market because of such measures.

You know what game isn't going to have Denuvo?

The Witcher 3.

I don't think you understand how hard drives work, if you are writing you can't read at the same time, it will cause the hard drive to be continuously seeking.

It's true most recent drives in the last 3 or 4 years can read >100MB/s and write at about 70MB/s, so yes ordinarily without the write it would take about 10 seconds to read 1GB if the data was contiguous, but writing at the same time would cut that in half or worse depending of the fragmentation and seek times. Then on top of that you have to load the game assets, that's what I'm talking about.

You'd think people would notice something like that.

I forgot to include that in the process of blowing up my DVD-ROM, it shattered my S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl disc.

And now the more I think about it, I remember it was Sniper Elite that my version of SecuROM came with. Not only did the game not run (it had some boot error and conflict with the DVD-ROM) but it destroyed a piece of my hardware. I ended up buying the game on Steam a few years later and never having an issue.

Invasive DRM never works. Legitimate licensees are the only one's impeded by it. If developers made games that people want to buy, then they will sell. Plenty of games have released without any DRM whatsoever (it's GOG.com's business model FFS) and done extremely well commercially.

Wasn't planning to get the game before. Definitely not now.

I rarely stoop to insulting users directly, but he was a jackass. Pure and simple. His existence on the board required that he win every argument, that everyone agree with him, and to disagree was akin to blasphemy. He also had a fairly pedantic tendency to sound like he was posting with a thesaurus beside him at all times. Every word that he could have used, that would have made his point very clear and easy to read, had to be replaced with countless other, much more complicated versions that, while they worked, sometimes felt out of context, grammatically.

But I won't get into a semantics discussion with regards to him. He might just hear his name and show up. What happened to him anyways? The dick-riders finally stop puffing up his ego and he leave?