Over a year after release, Jedi: Survivor has shed everyone's favourite DRM system and bid farewell to Denuvo. This welcome change is part of Patch 9, which also throws in some performance and quality of life improvements, along with some bug fixes. Just a shame it arrived a month after I finally got around to finishing Cal's latest adventure.
It's not uncommon for Denuvo to be removed from games a while after release. Launch is when publishers are most worried about piracy, naturally, and EA already considers Jedi: Survivor a commercial success. Anyway, this will be cause for celebration among those who blame Denuvo for performance issues, though the impact it has on games is inconsistent.
Back in 2018 we got Dark Souls modder Durante to test Final Fantasy 15, finding that there was no performance difference between the DRM-free version (specifically, the demo) and the DRM-laden retail version. That said, other tests conducted elsewhere with different games have revealed performance gains when Denuvo is removed.
Regardless, Denuvo offers no benefits for players, and even when DRM doesn't affect a game's performance, it can create other issues, thwarting modding and even rendering games unplayable, which most notably happened in 2021 when an issue with Denuvo's servers stopped people from being able to play a significant number of games, including Guardians of the Galaxy, Football Manager 2022, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Persona 4 Golden. Basically: Denuvo is a pain in the arse.
Patch 9 also promises frame rate improvements, fixes for frame rate hitching and the frustrating "Optimising Game Files" screen has itself been optimised. This was a particularly annoying issue: every time you fire the game up, you have to sit through this annoying rigamarole, effectively an extra (and extra long) loading screen. While Respawn making it quicker is a welcome change, you can actually skip it entirely with some tweaks.
Here's the full list of changes:
Performance Improvements:
- Frame rate improvements for various hardware configurations.
- Fixes for several sources of frame rate hitching for smoother gameplay.
- Ray tracing has been optimised for CPU usage and should now scale better for high-end GPUs.
- Fixes for performance related to using a mouse as gameplay input.
Quality of life:
- The "Optimising Game Files" screen has been optimised and can now see speed increases from multiple CPU cores.
- Mouse and keyboard functionality has been improved across a variety of menu screens, including the first time user screens, title menu, game menu, and workbench.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed collision issue where players could fall through elevators at low frame rates.
- Fix for a conversation-related crash when walking away from NPC characters.
- Fix for various, intermittent crashes.
General:
- Denuvo DRM has been removed.
