Gotham Knights Lost Denuvo Only For it to Ruturn Immediately
The first Gotham Knights update reportedly removed the Denuvo DRM from the game - but only for a short time. Significantly, its absence did not significantly affect the game's performance on PC at all. Even Core i9s and GeForce RTX 4090s cannot run it at 60 fps.
Released less than a week ago, Gotham Knights is not enjoying good press. Criticism of this WB Games Montreal game already began before the release, when it was announced that the title would run on PS5 and XSX at a modest 30 frames per second. The game's debut changed little; industry media gave it fairly mediocre scores, and gamers - whether on Steam, or on Metacritic.com - comparably or even worse.
This state of affairs may not be surprising, since Gotham Knights has huge performance issues. According to an analysis published today by Digital Foundry (see video below), even on a PC equipped with an Intel Core i9 processor and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 GPU, the game's frame rate drops below 60.
There are many indications that this is at least partly due to the Denuvo Anti-Tamper DRM protection, particularly disliked by gamers. In theory, it is supposed to protect games from hackers who want to release pirated copies online. In practice, however, it makes life rather miserable for legitimate buyers, as it significantly degrades performance on PC.
Gotham Knights players, with the game struggling to maintain high fps anyway, asked the developer to remove the security feature. Their request reportedly succeeded - but only for a while. Denuvo had quietly disappeared from the PC version of the game thanks to the first post-release update, released yesterday, only to... reappear in it again. At least that's what Steam users suggest. The game's card on Valve's platform also leaves no illusions about the presence of this DRM protection in the game.
Interestingly, temporary absence of Denuvo was to show that without it the performance is not much better at all. Only a slight increase in the number of frames per second was noticed.
The curiosity of the whole situation is compounded by reports that hackers are said to have already dealt with the security, and working pirated version of Gotham Knights - devoid of the troublesome Denuvo - is spreading across the web. If only for this reason, the restoration of this anti-tampering technology seems strange, to say the least.
For the record, let me add that Gotham Knights was released on October 21, 2022 for PC, PS5 and XSX/S.
