Ubisoft says DRM isn’t the reason Assassin’s Creed: Origins pushes CPUs

Enlarge / Ubisoft says detailed imagery like this, and not DRM, is pushing CPUs to their limits.

Ubisoft is pushing back against reports that the DRM used in Assassin's Creed: Origins is eating up significant CPU cycles and causing performance problems for many people playing the PC version of the game.

The explosive accusation comes from noted game cracker Voksi, who tells TorrentFreak that an analysis of Origins' binaries shows the game adds a protection method called VMProtect on top of well-known (and now easily cracked) Denuvo DRM. As the VMProtect webpage explains, its software protects crucial game code from cracking via mutation (i.e., obfuscating code with "garbage" commands and misdirected jumps) and virtualization (i.e., running the code in a self-contained "non-standard" virtual machine that is harder to analyze and modify).

Voksi alleges that Origins uses VMProtect's virtualization protection, which "tank[s] the game's performance by 30-40%, demanding that people have a more expensive CPU to play the game properly, only because of the DRM. It's anti-consumer and a disgusting move." In a Reddit thread, Voksi further detailed how breakpoint debugging of the code showed VMProtect's code being "called non-stop" in the game's core control loop.

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