Voices38 recently reported that the Denuvo anti-piracy protection in the game Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag Resync was successfully hacked. The main technical feature of this version is the complete abandonment of the classic method of using a hypervisor and modifying the executable file, allowing the game to run natively without deactivating the built-in Windows security element.
To verify the results, enthusiasts conducted direct performance tests between officially licensed and cracked versions. Testing was conducted on a powerful test bench equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card and an Odyssey G80SD monitor, running Windows 11 at a resolution of 3840×2160 with Ultra High graphics presets, maximum ray tracing and NVIDIA AA anti-aliasing.
The benchmark results refute the popular belief that bypassing Denuvo automatically improves frame rates. At 4K resolution, with the graphics card pressed, the licensed version produced an average of 71 FPS (maximum 93 FPS and 9723 rendered frames), while the pirated version showed 70 FPS (peak 91 FPS and 9677 frames). The small difference is within the margin of error, demonstrating that there is no automatic performance gain when removing protection.