Resident Evil Village’s PC patch is out, improving DRM performance issues

Capcom has released a new patch for the Steam version of Resident Evil Village designed to fix performance issues reportedly caused by its DRM technology.

Last week it was claimed that a ‘cracked’ version of the game which removed its copy protection ran noticeably better than the official release.

The claims were backed up by Digital Foundry, which compared the two different versions of the game running on the same PC.

The site’s technology editor, Richard Leadbetter, encountered “horrendous frame times and a collapse to frame rate on the official version, and a gigantic improvement with the crack installed”.

Capcom’s new patch was announced on the official Resident Evil website yesterday and refers to two changes designed to improve performance.

The first of these refers directly to the DRM issue, stating that “adjustments have been made to optimise the anti-piracy technology”.

The second is the introduction of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling technology, which means “players who use FSR will now be able to experience higher frame rates on PC for an improved gaming experience”.

After the news about the DRM issues spread last week, Capcom promised to improve Resident Evil Village’s performance with an official patch.

The issue appeared to be caused by Denuvo, an anti-tamper technology that has been criticised for its alleged high CPU usage during gameplay, which is claimed to significantly affect performance and frame rates.

“By stripping out what the hackers call Capcom’s entry points for the DRM, the game is absolutely transformed in [specific] areas,” wrote Leadbetter.

He added: “Fundamentally, the truth is that the cracked version of the game resolves the primary performance issues we encountered at launch, while two months on, those same issues remain unaddressed by Capcom.”

Capcom previously removed Denuvo DRM from the PC version of Devil Mary Cry V, resulting in claims of drastically improved framerates of up to 20fps for some users.

It also removed Denuvo from another of its 2019 titles, Resident Evil 2, via a post-release update.