For a few short hours after the PC release of Devil May Cry 5, a code fork available on Steam was available that stripped the game of its Denuvo copy protection, with only Steam's own DRM systems left intact, according to reports on the Steam community forums. Not surprisingly, the leaked .exe - apparently intended for use by Capcom's QA team - has been tested by a number of users, with some noting a 20fps improvement to performance, while others could see no improvement whatsoever. So, what's really going on and does Denuvo really hit CPU resources as has often been claimed? Since the .exe in question is not a crack of any sort, we decided to put it to the test.
We deployed our mainstream PC gaming test system for this one, which pairs a Core i5 8400 with 16GB of 2667MHz DDR4, along with an AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB. Devil May Cry 5 itself was installed onto an SSD, and to begin with, it's fair to say that we noted no difference in performance whatsoever. The game has much in common with another RE Engine title, Resident Evil 2 Remake, and the tech is characterised by leaning heavily on the GPU with a very light CPU footprint. With that in mind, bringing CPU performance to the forefront in order to discover any baseline load added by Denuvo isn't easy on this set-up.
To get to the bottom of the issue, we set the game to 480p output on the lowest settings, then engaged the interlace mode, which cuts GPU utilisation further still. At this point, with the GPU removed from contention as much as possible, the CPU becomes the limiting factor in performance, and we can start to see a difference between the two versions of the PC game. Here's how it looks: