Assassin’s Creed Mirage Performance Compared With and Without Denuvo

Critics of Denuvo have gained another argument to use in debate.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage was cracked again in September. A hacker known as voices38 previously bypassed the protection by tricking the DRM into believing the game was a licensed copy. Now, hackers from RUNE have offered a different approach by stripping the protection entirely from the game.

Kevin’s Tech Vids YouTube channel creator decided to compare two versions: the one by voices38 and the one by RUNE. Tests were conducted on a PC equipped with 64 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i7 13700K processor paired with a GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card.

The RUNE version loads faster and features a higher average frame rate. The minimum FPS with Denuvo was 162, compared to 186 without it, representing a 14% increase. Meanwhile, the maximum FPS showed little difference, standing at 232 with protection and 233 without.

GAMINJA conducted a different performance comparison, examining the original Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which features Denuvo and VMProtect, against the cracked RUNE version. The test ran on a PC with a GeForce RTX 4070 Super, a Ryzen 5 7600X processor, and 32 GB of RAM.

Judging by the footage shown, there is no major difference in frame rate, but the RUNE version consumes roughly 1 GB less RAM.

RUNE has not specified which game it plans to crack next.