Assassin's Creed Origins released last week and players have been noticing odd performance problems, including framerate drops. It has been reported that the cause of this is Ubisoft's DRM copy protection with Denuvo combined with VMProtect. Ubisoft denies this.
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Assassin's Creed Origins requires a really high CPU to run effectively, especially at 1080p 60FPS, which is a fact. What is also true is that it uses Denuvo DRM, used by many games and the cause of many reports of performance hits, and furthermore has VMProtect copy protection too. While this does mean that Origins still has not been cracked, which is good for Ubisoft, groups looking into the game claim that these DRM programs combined cause severe performance problems.
Group Revolt suggest that VMProtect is causing as high as a 30-40% CPU performance hit, with user Voksi supposedly offering proof of this, claiming that the reason this happens is because the game is constantly calling the VMProtect virtual machine in the background.
Ubisoft spoke with GearNuke, and are denying that the DRM causes any performance problems.
"We’re confirming that the anti-tamper solutions implemented in the Windows PC version of Assassin’s Creed Origins have no perceptible effect on game performance."
The Assassin's Creed series, and Ubisoft, have had plenty of issues with strange and user-unfriendly DRM systems going back to Assassin's Creed 2, which required players to be online at all times or they'd get booted out of the game without being able to save. Ubisoft abandoned that at the time, but clearly have gone back to similar DRM practices.
The big question here is though, is VMProtect and Denuvo actually causing PC performance problems, or is Ubisoft correct and the DRM isn't to blame for performance drops? Until Ubisoft removes the DRM, or some hacker group manages to get past VMProtect and takes it out, we can't know for sure.
Are you playing Assassin's Creed Origins on PC? How is your performance in the game? Let us know below!
