"Resource monitors for RAM and CPU consumption numbers, memory viewer for trying to figure out what makes it tick and track address issues, SSD analysis tools for those delicious dead blocks and data tracking
Wanna know average number of times parts of LotF exe code are fucked around between RAM and HDD in the span of one hour? 150000 copy/write iterations. That's about 10000 times more than usual. DRM constantly decrypts the game code into the memory and encrypts it back. This is the most bullshit usage of encryption software I've ever stumbled upon. And even though code chunks are quite small(couple of kilobytes per go at worst), they are all stored in one memory block. And playing the game for 4-8 hours(depends on SSD quality) means that you can say goodbye to that block."

From a russian forum:
"The game's readwrite operations per 40 minutes resulted in 30 GB of data processed. The number of operations done is insane.
SSD's wear level hasn't changed though, however, the load is EXTREMELY high, so after, say, 100 hours of gameplay memory blocks will definitely start to wear down."
Screenshot before/after:
Link

Source
Russian Source

TLDR; The DRM kills your storage, specifically SSD.

It causes excessive wear and tear of your storage causing it's life span to decrease due to excessive read and write operations.

UPDATE: Their website does not tell you much, however this seems like as a red flag, remember the sony rootkit?

UPDATE: Link to Russian site added; may cause performance issues.

10 years ago*

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Bumping I guess, seems interesting.

10 years ago
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Holy crap.

10 years ago
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Kills storage? Like it takes a lot of space on your HD or something?

10 years ago
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Wear and tear, basically. You can write to a sector only so much before it starts to have problems. This DRM causes the PC to write to the hard drive very often.

10 years ago
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SSD drives have a limited lifespan. After writing to them a certain amount of times, the space you're writing on becomes unusable. Normally it takes a very long time before you even get close to that number (assuming normal use), but since this new DRM writes to your storage drive 10000 times more than normal, your SSD also wears down 10000 times faster. So basically, the more you play games that use this DRM (like Lords of the Fallen or Dragon Age Inquisition), the more space on your SSD becomes totally unusable.

10 years ago
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so much technical term that i have no idea about, if i understand you post correctly ? it take up remain free space in HD after playing a while ?

10 years ago
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Nope.

If you use those new ultra fast hard drives (called SSD), then Lords of the Fallen will kill those drives much faster, because:

  • those new drives have limited number of operations they can do
  • Lords of the Fallen are doing ridiculous number of operations on hard drive
10 years ago
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lel

10 years ago
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Where can I find a list of games that use/could use Denuvo? I'm only seeing Dragon Age: Inquisition and possibly GTA V so far.

10 years ago
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Lords of the Fallen, FIFA 15, and potentially all future EA and WB titles.

10 years ago
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Do you know if there is official list.
Unfortunately I have few EA and Ubi games, got on HB and sales, and wanted to get Shadows of Mordor and finally play Batman games which are WB's games.

10 years ago
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As far as i know GTA V wont use Denuvo.

10 years ago
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Question: is that DRM fault, or just shitty Lords of the Fallen programmers?

Because they are shitty programmers, Lords of the Fallen is their first really playable game, while they already made and published over 50 games, if they even can be called games (I think crap is more accurate).

10 years ago
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Not really.
Game is made separate form protection software. Protection software is outside layer of the game, and any game is build to work without protection software.

10 years ago
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There were few examples where DRM was cause of various issues (Witcher 2, for example - "cracked"/gog'ed game was working better than boxed copy that had DRM at release).

But in this case I think some pirate-lobby might want to give false info about DRM.

10 years ago
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Thank you for the info. I didn't know that. Now I'll re-install my Steam W2 with GoG's.

10 years ago
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That's not the case anymore, read what PsyKo said: "at release". W2 EE has no issues, no need to reinstall.

10 years ago
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Its OK, I forgot that W2 was on my old HDD which "blow up" and I didn't install W2 since then on my new HDD;

10 years ago
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and yet another reason i have not went to using SSD they are nice and fast but still

and i am sure if it is hard to crack that a lot more games will use it at least ones not directly using steam drm

but the big question is if this is true how will this effect game sales will it cause more harm then good

as if i had ssd and this way true i would avoid any game that does that

luckily i pretty much avoid anything that EA or UBI spits out so for the short term i am safe as i still use old hard drives and i do not play hardly anything that is not on steam and uses steam DRM

10 years ago
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Most steam games use CEG, which similarly encrypts gamecode.

10 years ago
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thats very serious but its not confirmed yet, till now its just a post by a random guy.

10 years ago
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StarForce deja vu?!

Guess many of you weren't around for that, but StarForce was destroying the CD-ROM unit quite fast. Pirates had no problems, though, because, you know, cracks. Lost an optical unit to Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory due tot the DRM. Stopped buying any game that was using that type of protection.

Vote with your wallets people. Show to the corporate types that think of you as nothing and as their personal wallets that you don't need to be treated as a criminal and pay for that. In a month, 6 months or an year, their new, shiny protection will be cracked (happened every time, sooner or later protections are fragged and the only victims are the customers).

There are plenty of good indie games or AA games that won't treat you as a criminal. Let the big corporations that if they treat you wrong, you keep your wallets tight.

P.S.: DA:I was available for the console pirates since last week. Because, you know, there is no piracy on consoles.

10 years ago
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This. NEVER buy games with excessive DRM, throw your money at GOG, not DRM allowing competition, do anything you can to kill such practices before they start :|

10 years ago
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+1.

10 years ago
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If GTA V comes out with this DRM then I'm goning to lose my shit. My new computer and the ssd are just waiting for it to come out. That DRM is having an opposite effect. It's making me try and pirate the game. Also, Lords of the Fallen... :(

10 years ago
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They confirmed it wasn't going to have Denuvo.

10 years ago
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Why not buy the game and then crack it? While altering the binary is a breach of most EULAs, if the licensee (ie. game "buyer") is only using it personally (ie. not duplicating it) then it will be dismissed in court due to lack of damages.

10 years ago
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It will have a negative effect. First is that they will get the message that it's all right to continue this type of practice by looking at the sale numbers. Secondly this is further fuel their idea that they could have achieved more sales due to the inflated number of pirated copy downloads from legitimate customers who were only trying to get rid of the DRM for the game which they bought.

10 years ago
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I wasn't talking about downloading an entire cracked game - that would be a waste of data allowance - just a cracked executable/library... so that point isn't really valid. But your first point definitely is. A couple posts down I mention the accountability of the consumer. Ultimately what I'm doing is providing objectivity; any inferences are exactly that.

10 years ago
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So far Denuvo cannot be cracked, so that's not really an option.

You either play it with DRM, or you don't play it at all.

10 years ago
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"So far..." <- If humans made it, other humans will break it... Determination does wonders for achieving a goal. But, yes, any gamer currently compelled to play it will be stuck with that DRM.

10 years ago
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"Denuvo cannot be cracked"

Really ? How come Dragon Age Inquisition is already cracked on PC before its release ?

edit : my mistake, it doesn't seem to have been cracked yet.

10 years ago
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There seems to be console torrents already. But that can't be true, because piracy doesn't exist on consoles, right?

10 years ago
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Of course no, it doesn't.

10 years ago
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Not buying the game is sending a message. Ubi took a hint with both StarForce and UPlay always online DRM's when they saw their sales plummeting. Let them remove the protection. Than buy it for peanuts, as that's all they deserve for treating their customers as criminals and ruining their hardware. If i buy the game now, i still won't be able to play it, as i can't afford to buy a hard-drive every two months or so. And the crack won't be out anytime soon as this looks like a tough nut to crack. So is preferable to keep my money for other purchases and buy this once the DRM abomination is removed or the game is cracked.

Send a message, people, and stop caving in at every new triple A release. Show to them that they can't survive without you (or at least their PC part won't survive)

P.S.: the people behind Denuvo are the same people that made SecuROM and the Sony rootkit, just under a different name. So don't support the companies that are pushing that kind of DRM on the paying customers.

10 years ago
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I agree that not buying a product is an excellent form of protest; at the end of the day, if the gamer (ie. the consumer) lives in a democracy then it is up to them to dictate the company's (future) behaviour. Democracy/Capitalism is driven by the people/consumers; if a product is in demand, the company will make it... Which ultimately means the consumer is at fault; a consumer that complains about a product (or line of products), buys that product, then resents the producers of it, needs to have a good hard look at how important they perceive their self to be.

10 years ago
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I think this is not a case for DA:I, I just played for whole hour and I don't seem to find anything weird, using both Resource Monitor and Process Explorer, I/O are at 0-1%, even my browser use more I/O.

But then again, I don't know what to look though.
http://i.imgur.com/636aMdW.jpg

10 years ago
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what the hell

10 years ago
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I hope they innovate themselves out of business.

10 years ago
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Hell yes, f*ck more with the customers. Clap-clap-clap. I'm not gonna buy any game which comes with this "awesome" drm.

10 years ago
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I didnt get it, is it a software or a virus or background process? Please someone explain, because its look interesting.

10 years ago
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The DRM in question does excessive readwrite operations resulting in excessive use of your hdd/ssd. This decreases the lifespan of your hdd/ssd (very drastically in ssd case). This is because it constantly encodes and decodes the game data in an attempt to prevent it from being cracked.

10 years ago
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There is no writing to disk, you can see this by checking that files doesn't change.
Code is already encrypted on disk, but gets read to memory when starting game and is then decrypted on demand (so crackers can't read decrypted code from memory). Decrypted code can then be discarded after it's no longer used.

10 years ago
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It's a DRM that continually decrypts and re-encrypts data while you play, thuis performing tons of read/ re-write.

That would kill SSDs because they have a limited number of write accesses.

edit : ninja'ed while I was replying
10 years ago
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Seems your first "source" is also just quoting from somewhere, but he/she does not mention the source.

So far I'd call your source "unreliable".

10 years ago
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Sounds like he left pagefile on SSD. You can tell that even before game there's 10GB of average writes and is blaming it on DRM.
Also program code never gets written back to disk, it can be simply discarded because it's already on disc.

Also SSD are made to not reuse same block, this is known as wear leveling. Instead blocks are cycled so they get equal use.

TL;DR. It's fun to cause panic by bshitting on new DRMs by using technical terms.

10 years ago
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Deleted

This comment was deleted 6 years ago.

10 years ago
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just move your freaking pagefile to other drive than SSD and you won't even feel the difference. Geez.

10 years ago
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Yeah, it's not like SSDs main purpose is specifically to boost speed of your computer by letting it to load needed data instantly or anything. Maybe we should go back to 486, too?

10 years ago
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Add more memory so you don't need pagefile?

Pagefile causes a lot of writes, which leads to SSD wearing.

Still it's premature optimisation, I have 'very small' pagefile (10 GB) and have around 62312 Gbytes or 62 Terabytes of writes in 684 days.
This corresponds to 96% of SSD life left.

This means that expected lifetime is only 46 years. However it's recommended to replace at 10%, so... I need to buy new one in ~40 years.
This is ridiculously low compared to mechanical drives, right?

10 years ago
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In laptops, adding ram can be very expensive. Besides, why exactly we need to throw money at machine which is working just fine due to same braindead DRM scheme, again? It's like buying kevlar tires for your car because some lazy toll road operator decided to throw a few buckets of broken glass on it...

By the way, OP stated 10 TB of writes, 1/6 of your 2 years worth, in just a day. How long would your SSD last with that?

10 years ago
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Again, it isn't because of DRM but insufficient memory, if you have insufficient memory you can't just blame DRM for it, right?

Edit: Insufficient, as in you have to rely on pagefile to free actual memory.

10 years ago
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No, we should use our hardware properly, SSD itself provides a big boost in performance, pagefile on the other hand should be moved from SSD to HDD where you have more space and it can't harm because of big write sequences.

10 years ago
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Deleted

This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

10 years ago
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Jesus :|

That's why everyone should migrate to GOG as fast as possible :/

10 years ago
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Has anyone counted the numbers of writes ?

Someone who happens to own a Denuvo-protected game and a SSD diagnostic tool would be useful in clearing things up.

10 years ago
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To what would you compare it?

Games tend to do a lot of writes in background. (Statistics, logging, saves, etc.) and then there's background processes doing writes.

You'd need to log what was actually written by what and analyse it. (It's possible there's free tools to do it).

10 years ago
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Fair enough, I don't know. I lack the knowledge about these matters. I'd just like to know the truth.

10 years ago
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