If you've been following the story of Denuvo's recent struggle against the weaponization of savants in the piracy scene, there's a juicy double-whammy of news on that front. Grab your popcorn or fire extinguisher, depending on which side you're on. First, voices38, who's been steadily cracking Denuvo-protected games for a while now, released a full crack for Resident Evil: Requiem, a title that's just over 40 days old, with the DRM fully disabled. It also runs much better than the bypassed version.

As if that weren't enough bad news for Denuvo's parent company, Irdeto, the existing hypervisor-based bypass (HV) that currently requires disabling most of Windows' security layers is seemingly getting a serious upgrade. According to MKDev member KiriGiri, the bypass should soon become plug-and-play, as "[they] found a way to make HV crack to be used without disabling any windows security or other things" (sic).

If you're not up to speed on all this, the summary is that Denuvo has been successfully bypassed across many new games, resulting in zero-day repacks out on popular sites like FitGirl's. However, said bypass is cumbersome and risky; its characteristics are bound to change as soon as it receives the purported upgrade. Moreover, it keeps Denuvo's code in the game, leading to the usual performance penalties famously associated with the DRM.

A traditional crack, meanwhile, strips away or neutralizes all Denuvo code in a game. Doing that takes a particular set of skills, and the cracker (or group) voices38 has been the one spearheading efforts, slowly but surely cracking 2024 and 2025 releases.

The release of a crack for Resident Evil: Requiem, a title that's only 40 days old, implies with high likelihood that Denuvo will get completely stripped out of recent games soon enough. Voices38 has reportedly been working on toolkits for contemporary Denuvo for a long while now, and it apparently took them only two weeks to pull off this latest feat after all the virtual ducks were in a row.

The cracked Requiem predictably runs faster, smoother, and uses far fewer resources than the HV version, and presumably by extension, than the full paid-for release. One point does not a dataset make, but ChillyWillMD ran a quick comparison between the two versions, and the cracked one delivers roughly 5% better FPS, a shocking 1.5 to 2 GB drop in VRAM, and sometimes close to 1 GB drop in system memory usage.

Our trusty eyeballs also say that the CPU spike and frametime graph is slightly improved on the cracked version, with fewer CPU usage spikes and sometimes lower frametimes — both exceedingly important for a feeling of gameplay smoothness. The tested system has an Intel Core i9-13900K CPU and an RTX 3090 graphics card. We hypothesize that machines with weaker processors will see even greater benefits from removing Denuvo.

This spells serious trouble in all-caps for Irdeto, as now there's a two-prong attack against Denuvo. The company predictably already promised upgrades to its software, all while running the game at the standard user-space operating system layer. The DRM developers have to get really creative now, and as the saying goes, may the odds ever be in their favor.

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Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.