Pirates claim Resident Evil 8 crack fixes performance problems

While some players had no problems with the performance of Resident Evil Village on PC, others have reported regular stuttering, especially when swarms of flies appear during boss fights and enemies grab the player to go in for a bite, as well as during cutscenes, when enemies die, and in the market area of the village. 

A pirated version of RE8 by cracker Empress claims to have fixed these problems by bypassing the Denuvo DRM. Empress's notes on the crack say, "All in-game shutters like the one from when you kill a zombie are fixed because Capcom DRM's enty [sic] points are patched out so most of their functions are never executed anymore" and "the worst is that their DRM was fully obfuscated in Denuvo's VM making it run even slower."

You can see the differences in performance illustrated in the video above, in which the cracked game runs much more smoothly. However, it's worth noting a couple of things. The first is that the two sources were captured with different versions of Nvidia's GPU drivers installed—the retail version is being played with 466.63, and the cracked version is running on 471.11, which was released 19 days later. More significantly, the cracked version is completely missing the vampire's bite animations, and according to the YouTuber who captured the footage other boss attacks are absent as well.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.