Krafton has removed Denuvo protection from the horror action film The Callisto Protocol. The game was released in December 2022 and received mixed reviews. It's a good mix of horror and action in the style of the Dead Space series, but the controversial combat system and technical problems have upset some players. At the start there were many complaints about poor optimization and stutters. The developers have slightly improved performance in subsequent updates. There is also an opinion that Denuvo protection affects performance. And in the case of The Callisto Protocol, this turned out to be true.
We conducted some testing on the DSOGaming website. Just a week before Denuvo was removed, the site featured comparative testing of different processors in 10 games, including The Callisto Protocol. And the author simply repeated the tests on the same configuration. The game ran on a system with a Ryzen 9 7950X3D processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card with ray tracing active in Full HD (1920 x 1080). And it turned out that without Denuvo the game has a better minimum frame rate. Previously, the test PC showed an average result of 120 fps and 1% low 80 fps in the game. But after the latest update, the 1% low parameter increased to 98 frames.
The author notes that in the final version of the game there is a more uniform load across the cores. And even without testing, it feels like the game is running more smoothly. Previously, it was believed that Denuvo only affected weak PCs, but it seems that as protection becomes more complex, it becomes more resource-intensive.