Denuvo DRM destroying hard drives!
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Forum Discussion
I'm still trying to get to the bottom of this, because I'm confused about whether or not this is a problem. I emailed Crucial for more information, and here's the pertinent part of the message they sent me:
"Essentially the way the Denuvo DRM works with Dragon age Inquisition is it's constantly encrypting and decrypting the data for games as you play it, so instead of reading data directly off the SSD as fast as possible, your drive is being hampered by the speed at which your CPU can encrypt and decrypt data; in the data industry we call this software encryption, and it can severely hamper drive performance.
There is unfortuantley little you can do to address this issue, and it most likely have similar performance with any type of SSD. Your drive appears to benchmark fine, so we know there isn't any limitation or fault in the drive itself, the problem again lays with the Denuvo encryption that EA decided to implement with this game. I have read forums post people have made in response the Denuvo an they all approach the issue not in terms of performance, but "damaging SSDs", where EA confirms that Denuvo will not damage SSDs, but I can find no official statement by EA with regards to how their DRM software effects performance. I can tell you that any type of software encryption will drastically decrease the performance of any drive, including SSDs, seeing that Denuvo has been shown to use encryption it is only natural that it would result in less than expected game load times.
This all unfortuantley means that an SSD will at best give you only marginal benefits on loads times, compared to other types of games that do not use encryption DRMs; your load times and SSDs are entirely limited by the CPU's ability to handle the encryption load, and how the encryption software is setup to utilize system performance."
I played DA: I for about 15 minutes, loading between 4 different areas. I noticed Windows did not report any significant disk activity in the task manager during this time. The SSD, however, said that there was 3.57GB written during that 15 minute span.
I don't know what to make of that.
One thing to help speed up on some of the major load screens is putting Origin in Offline mode. You can cut between 3-30 seconds of load time depending on your internet, where you are going, and what logging of the game data Origin is doing on the Keep/EA. I don't have SSDs, but I found with my HardDrives that it could take 75 seconds to load into a game with Origin online, and 45 seconds with it offline. Traveling between most areas meant 40-45s loads offline and usually 45-50s online. The main savings was going to Haven and Skyhold, with 15-30s savings during that load.
