It's probably not a coincidence that there are a number of Tomb Raider stories doing the rounds at the same time the series is celebrating its 25th anniversary, with Monday 25 October marking the exact birthdate of one of gaming's most famous protagonists. There was even some footage revealed which showed that the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot was originally going to be a survival horror. Now, there have been some additional developments on one of the later games after it turned out that the studio removed DRM anti-tamper software.
A few days ago, it was announced that both Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider had Denuvo removed, as well as being updated to be compatible with Nvidia's DLSS visual upscaling algorithm. Given that this somewhat controversial anti-tamper software is considered a blight on game performance, a recent report shows that the latter game from 2018 is now running better than before.
In the report, a benchmark test was conducted on the latest Tomb Raider installment, both before and after Denuvo had been removed. Running at 1920x1080 resolution, on an Nvidia RTX 3080, and the graphics being set to the highest, though without ray-tracing, there is a noticeable difference in the frame rate. While the minimum is improved by about three FPS, the average jumps from 163 to 175 FPS, which is an eight FPS deviation. At lower settings, as can be imagined, this difference was even more significant, with there being a difference of 17 FPS between the Denuvo and non-Denuvo versions of the game.
While it would be tempting to say that this could be just due to the general update of the game bringing with it some graphical optimizations, apparently the developer itself says the latest patch did not come with visual improvements. It is an interesting difference between the two version of Shadow, especially given that Denuvo is often blamed for games performing suboptimally. While DRM is often implemented to prevent people from hacking or tampering with software, it's generally considered to be an unpopular inclusion for many gamers.
With studios like Crytek also choosing to remove Denuvo from titles, there could be something of a trend on the horizon as companies strive to ditch the disliked anti-tamper feature. In a way it's understandable that studios would not want people to hack into games, but given the ways in which the likes of Denuvo interrupt performance, there's an opportunity for others to come and take a leaf from Eidos-Montreal and Crytek's book.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox One X/S.
Source: DSO Gaming