Modder ‘Kaldaien’, best known for his incredible mods for NieR: Automata, Monster Hunter World, Final Fantasy XV and more, is currently working on a SpecialK mod for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The first version of this mod is currently available for download and according to the modder, the high CPU load that PC gamers witness in both Origins and Odyssey is not caused by the Denuvo anti-tamper tech.
As Kaldaien explained, the high CPU load is due to insane driver overhead caused by naive resource management. It appears that the game has a much too conservative resource ceiling for textures, meaning that the engine loads, then unloads and later reloads the same assets hundreds of thousands of times over the course of an hour.
What’s also really funny here is that according to the modder, those with SSDs will experience higher CPU usage than those with HDDs.
So yeah, from the looks of it Denuvo is not causing any performance issues in both Origins and Odyssey. Furthermore, and given the fact that Kaldaien has explained what is mainly causing the high CPU load, Ubisoft should be able to fix this once it’s been informed about it.
“It should be easily fixable. Clearly the dev. team focuses on consoles because there appears to be no consideration given to the significantly higher throughput of PC storage devices such as my NVMe SSDs in RAID0. The faster your disk is and the more CPU cores you have, the more of an unpredictable performance nightmare this all becomes.”
As said, Kaldaien has released the first version of his SpecialK mod for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey that features Alternate Task Scheduling (causes task threads to sleep more often), Re-Balance Interval (works around a Windows scheduler bug for Ryzen CPUs that tries to run 75% of the game’s thread on a single CPU core) and Multimedia Class Scheduling (intelligently raises and lowers the priority of resource management threads as they begin to impact the availability of the CPU for non-resource loading tasks).
Those interested can download the mod from here!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
Wow, once again, thank you Ubisoft…
I did not need to be an expert to come that realization (or maybe I am an expert), the game is just CPU heavy, plain and simple, both the games have a ton of moving parts in the game world, the NPCs as well as the animals all have a routine they follow and all have extremely detailed animations. All of this is handled by the CPU and when we triple the framerate to 60 fps compared to the consoles cinematic 23.976 fps our CPUs need to world thrice as hard as well so anything below an i7 will struggle.
This doesn’t make sense, as all of the CPU-controlled elements you just described are already rendered by the CPU even at the console level. Tripling the framerate is not going to increase the load further on the CPU, as all of the CPU logic is calculated. It’s only going to strain the GPU to sample the rendered scene at 3 times as many frames.
As I said I am no expert but this might explain why the overwhelming majority of open-world games do not have a 60 fps mode with reduced visuals on even the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro despite having a significantly better GPU than the launch consoles.
The explanation is that the Console CPUs simply can’t handle games as well as modern desktop CPUs can.
LOL, u haven’t got a clue what you are talking about.
Very likely.
Your smarts are too much for my feeble mind.
You are full of it.
What gave it away?
LOL Jesus. Intellectual drivel at its finest. Great deductive logic.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/fbbb8d5a64deaf67a6efe35a376354fe20f4fb710d1deb207ec5962e9032569e.gif
We DON’T trust this modder. Period.
Correct me, but isn’t Kaldaien is one of the most rabid Denuvo defenders on Steam, and many have compained against his work. Don’t know why you keep supporting him, and post articles on his findings !!
Think he was also banned from the NieR Forums ??
Correction:
He was a big defender of Denuvo and but recently since Monster Hunter World he has started to criticize Denuvo a lot.
So, now he’s trying to play the other side ? But in the end, it’s hard to trust his theory/findings, given the nature of his work, and as evident by the feedback received from the gaming community as a whole.
Is it so hard to believe that denuvo can be poorly implemented in one game and well implemented in another?
I don’t see that as “playing both sides” I see that as calling it as it comes through.
I don’t know this guy, but I’ve come across many articles that have, time after time, shown that denuvo is just a minor hit to performance, if at all, yet people still believe otherwise. It has nothing to do with evidence at this point. It comes down to a viewpoint that’s ingrained like political views. All the data in the world wouldn’t convince anyone either way.
There are multiple versions of denuvo and most of them are implemented badly. When you say minor pefomance hit, which games are we even talking about and what version of denuvo?
Middle Earth Shadow of War had no perf hit with denuvo. It really does come down to how the dev implements it.
Do you even know there are multiple versions and layers of DENUVO being implemented ?
Not just one…VMprotect also has a taxing effect on performance.
Stop posting nonsense, unless u have proof to back up your so-called claim. jeez
As mentioned in my post, proof means nothing to you people.
This “dirthurts” guy is a real moron. lol
stfu.
Haha, that makes little to NO sense at all. You just made my day…
ITS A TRAP
I’m honestly glad to hear an alternate explanation with at least some constitution to it though than just “the DRM is why the CPU usage is so high”. That doesn’t mean he should be blindly trusted, but what he describes does seem to coincide with my experience of the two games and also, I’ve seen quite consistent reports in these titles that users running the game from SSD’s have even more intensive CPU usage. This also lines up with my experience, as I’m running it from an NvME 960 EVO and my 2080 Ti is getting bottlenecked by my 5820K @ 4.7 GHz regularly. I tried running the game instead of a single spare SATA3 SSD that I have and sure enough, my CPU usage is significantly lower.
This theory needs to be more empirically validated than it currently is, just as the claims that DRM was the cause (and they never were empirically validated either, just axiomatically accepted by most of the automatic DRM-hating consumer community), but I’m glad to see something that has a little more real-world and anecdotal information supporting it, because as I mentioned, I’ve seen quite a few reports with this game that users running from an SSD are having a harder time than from slower storage media.
Well at least it was incompetence and not denuvo in this case or so it seems. Has ubisoft acknowledged this problem as of yet ?
I doubt it’s as much incompetence as it is funding and manpower. Ubi only allows for so much time to go to their PC ports. If they were given more time and resources I’m sure it would be handled better.
Really ??
You see that they’ve created one of the largest open world games ever created and you think they couldn’t cross the final yard line with a little more time? I’m seeing incompetence, but not from the devs…
It was always incompetence the point is when does incompetence stop. The 20 drm layers on top of it is also incompetence.
ubisoft is trying to push too many draw calls using directx11 that cpus are not able to keep up
this is why directx12 and vulkan exist ubisoft, time to embrace the future
not to mention vmprotect+denvuo combination that too is another culprit
While this may or may not be true, speaking so generally isn’t remotely productive to the discussion/issue at hand. “Too many draw calls” is hardly helpful to point out.
How many draw calls exactly are too many? What is the limit? How many draw calls is this game producing that leads you to conclude that it’s exceeding DX11’s so-called “draw call limit”?
This looks to be just regurgitation of previous, trite comments that people have used in the past to describe games that are demanding.
Also, again…. There is to date, zero proof that the DRM cocktail in Origins and Odyssey are the cause of high CPU usage. The only empirical evidence available demonstrates merely the presence of VMProtect on top of Denuvo, not the performance effects of this combination. They could be anything from negligible to catastrophic as far as anyone currently knows. People just seem to cling to the latter option by default for some reason, I guess because people don’t like DRM as a general rule so they’re happy to blame it for things they don’t like. I don’t mind it if it isn’t intrusive and doesn’t slow my game down. As of yet, there is no proof that DRM in these games actually is the cause of the CPU hits, so until then, I’m going to continue searching for answers that can be verified.
Instead of API the problem most likely on the game engine side instead. Vulkan and DX12 does not really solve the problem if the game engine being the one that creating the issue in the first place. Look at the explanation that has been given.
Meh, can this guy be really trusted in the first place?
Why? Because his findings disagree with the opinion you already hold that the CPU usage is caused by DRM?
Baldman’s finding are that denuvo has millions of checks per second that affects cpu.
Id take the opinion of someone who cracked denuvo rather the opinion of someone who sucks denuvos dck 24/7
I remember his screenshot from Origins’ release demonstrating that VMProtect was definitely being used in the game alongside Denuvo and I also remember him stating that this was causing a lot of extra work but it was still never really proven that Origins would have been much easier on the CPU without. The CPU is doing a lot OF things millions of times when a game is running. That doesn’t mean it’s contributing to every CPU being under full load.
Look, I’m not an advocate of intrusive DRM – I just want performance issues like this to be fixed one way or the other. But blindly blaming it on the DRM just because the DRM is present isn’t going to solve the problem. Game devs won’t take it seriously unless someone can prove directly in a well illustrated briefing that the game’s CPU usage could be lowered significantly without the DRM present and demonstrate how the game runs without the DRM to back that up further. No one has yet to do this, but at least this, if it turns out to be valid, seems to be pointing out a more specific cause of the issue that he might even be able to improve and recreate himself. There’s also a fair amount of anecdotal reports that people are getting lower CPU usage and slower drives, which lends a bit of credibility. If this can be explicitly demonstrated to Ubisoft in a public manner, they might feel the onus to do something about it. Just showing that “Hey, you’re using two forms of DRM at the same time and one of them appears to be super busy” hardly provides any proof that the game would perform much better without said DRM,which is essentially all that baldman demonstrated .
What you remember isnt true because baldman stopped cracking games before origins due to having alot or work with his real life job. CPY cracked origins. CPY emulates denuvo, baldman removed the triggers. So origins cracked or not still has denuvo.
The case Baldman was talking about was a poor implementation of the DRM in the game “RiME” because Denuvo doesn’t work together with Unity Engine games.
No he is the most untrustworthy person on denuvo.
+1.. I had the same opinion, though, to avoid any further heated discussion, I edited my original comment.
Why?
if you ask that you have no idea who he is.
Nope. Cannot fully trust this modder. Period.
Kaldaien is/was one of the most rabid Denuvo defenders on Steam, and many have complained against his work. Don’t know why this website keeps on posting articles on his findings (because of the contradictory nature) !!
Think he was also banned from the NieR Forums as well ?
Is it that he just wants people to buy games? I mean, he’s not wrong in that. If we can get a really good mod that does what people want and there’s a bit of string attached, well, why not? Afterall, we’re not paying anything for mod.
I think those people who complain against Kal are sour gummy bears with no sweetness to offset.
Don’t bother. this kaldaien guy is not to be taken seriously by any means.
Correction: it’s not Denuvo but VMProtect that causes 15-30% performance impact for the sake of ‘security’
could be.
steam,denuvo, vmprotect, uplay and you expect the game to run well with all that bloatware?
That’s why Origins surprisingly runs well on my toaster.
Ubisoft Kyiv at it again. Just close that studio down. Every PC port is a f**kup from them.
so this is how ubisoft does it. They just give everything to kiev to port it. Nice treatment of pc you got there ubi and kiev.
They ported every Assassin since Revelations, Driver SF, Far Cry 3 4 5 Primal, Ghost Recon, Watch Dogs 1 2
They haven’t touched MMO games like Division and The Crew 1 2 . Crew 2 ran amazingly good even in closed beta.
Ya, Kaldaien is also a very well known Denuvo boot licker, so I wouldn’t trust a word from his mouth on the topic. Shill to the furthest extent.
In the end however, if you are still buying Ubisoft garbage at this point in time? You’re well beyond hope anyways.
I’m guessing that if he had confirmed that DRM was the cause of the CPU performance hit, you’d be licking his boot for confirming your bias.
lol You sure told me.
Yeah, he did.
haha. Is that really you?
He argues the performance issues are because of constant texture reloads, textures mostly use gpu, on the other hand its well known that denuvo hast millions of trigger checks per second, which does affect cpu usage. To that add vmprotect and then you wonder why it runs like that. Why wouldnt it?
FACTS don’t care about your feelings.
When you merely take someone’s word at face value? It’s not a fact. It’s sad that I have to explain this to you.
Now, if you want to go investigate the issue first hand and verify it, then you can rest assured that it’s indeed, a fact.
And why should I take YOUR word for a fact that Denuvo is supposedly hurts CPU usage?
thats what crackers say.
lol
The last good Ubisoft game was SC: CT.
DSO commenters on suicide watch?
??????????
When i hear that the denuvo shill says its not denuvo i immediately disregard meanwhile people who cracked denuvo did say it affects cpu usage by alot. But yeah vmprotect is worse as far as performance go.
I dont give a f*ck what the “cause” is. Should have been fixed prior to release. We go through these damn discussions every single Ubisoft release and
they continue to get a free pass – excused away by reason X and swept
under the rug.
Consumers agree to pay money in a transaction for a result, not effort! Just like my boss doesn’t pay me for my best effort. Their poor performance is not the consumer’s problem and needs to be fixed. These games are not made by college kids or a small struggling studio that needs empathy. Ubicrap needs to be vehemently held accountable for releasing garbage performing crap again.
Why is gaming the only industry where broken products and monetization are acceptable?!
…and breathe…
Everything you said doesn’t matter because no matter what, people will buy it regardless. Just look at the amount of people playing it on steam. These people do not care, you’d be surprised as to the lengths that many people go in order to be one of the cool kids on the block playing the latest and the not so greatest. I’m a simple man, i see a Ubisoft game and i DON’T BUY. Companies like Ubisoft can do no wrong man.
Gameplay wise it’s IMO the best AC game to date, it reminds me the witcher 3 in a lot of ways. When it comes to performance, maybe it could be improved, but still game runs at 60fps on my PC anyway, the only thing I had to do is lower few details mentioned in digital foundry performance guide. AC Odyssey is huge game, probably it’s the best looking sandbox on PC right now and even with maxed out details game still runs better than deus ex, or ARK, quantum break.
Well this game still runs better than FFXV on PC. Despite the issues this game may have, for me Odyssey and Origins ran many times better than FFXV on my PC setup. FFXV simply just has many more faults in the PC optimization than Odyssey and Origins. And Square Enix still hasn’t released a proper patch to address these issues.
At least Ubisoft does try to optimize their games more and sort of succeeds, for many users at least. Square Enix more or less gives unfinished PC ports and gives us the middle finger. Which is why I lost interest in the Avengers game that Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics are going to release at some point in the future.
Dude, I am pretty sure if CD is working on it, they’re gonna use their amazing engine for Tomb Raider that pushes graphics but is still very well optimized.
I don’t doubt Crystal Dynamics’ development team. I’m confident they can make a solid working Avengers game, especially a good PC port.
That’s not the issue here. None of the development teams that Square Enix works with are incapable of creating good PC ports of great games. It’s about Square Enix’s prioritization of them. Avalanche Studios were fully capable of making a good PC port of Just Cause 3, Platinum Games were capable of creating a good PC port of NieR:Automata.
The problem is simple, Square Enix does not care enough about the PC platform in order to give us properly working games.
Just Cause 3, NieR:Automata and FFXV all have PC optimization issues that would be easily patched if Square Enix allowed the developers enough time to address them and make the game properly. Most likely those games got botched because Tomb Raider are the company’s money maker.
It’s not unlike Activision, who focused so much on Call of Duty and Destiny that their smaller franchises like Spider-Man and other Marvel games didn’t get the proper attention. Which is why Activision lost the game license for it.
Warner Bros also tried to do same shtick with Batman Arkham Knight. They focused to much on getting the game out to make a quick buck, which left the development team (Rocksteady) with no proper control or time to actually polish and make a good game, and a decent PC port.
Yeah noticed that people on Steam calling out Ubi are being called trolls and other crap. Looks like Ubi has their armies of will-work-for-a-headpat thralls and community managers on the payroll on top of this one.
The customer is the one to blame here. Good comment anyways, you got my vote.
thats why sony exclusives are better
Denuvo wasn’t mention in the link so it’s not possible to tell, its not like two problems couldn’t exist at once, which isn’t a claim that Denuvo does cause any perceptable issue either.
Right….
If this is the case then why would turning on v- sync drop my CPU usage from 90+% to 50-60%. Anyone know this guys background? Hard to tell if he really knows what he talking about and what the issues are. Seems half his fixes do something and other half are placebo.
DSOGaming the only website that gives him cred nowadays.
This has been known since Assassin’s Creed: Unity, there’s overheard alright, in the fact Ubisoft keeps pushing more draw calls than DirectX11 can handle.
If Ubisoft used DirectX12 it would solve half the problem, the other half is Ubisoft actually optimising the game for PC and drop NVidia unoptimised tech while doing it.
Next time bring actual news.
Kaldaien, Denuvo and Ubisoy. So much cancer.
Yes.. cry for me. Lick the peanut butter off of the bread.
Honestly speaking, those are actually facts. No one is crying/brooding over this whole issue though.
Regardless where the problem lies, THIS is why you never buy fall Ubisoft games when they are released. Wait until Christmas at the earliest so the people who have a clue report enough so they get a couple patches out.
from what i can tell from how my game is working and how its using the ssd i think he’s right
“Modder Kaldaien”
Oh, the re*ard. stop giving this imp attention.
The explanation is that the Console CPUs simply can’t handle games as well as modern desktop CPUs can.
**Don’t reply/up-vote**
That’s a copy/paste spam bot. Originally posted by “@zeroax1”.
Don’t bellieve that Denuvo doesn’t even cause 1% higher system load than if the game didn’t have it so I didn’t buy the game if I want to play the game i’ll have to use an Unauthroized copy.
I’ve personallly tested and played multliple games with Denuvo the result is always a performancec impact within that game or other games / tasksk running than running more than one task alll without Denuvo..
Denuvo is bad blaotware, even if perforamncce impacts at all were not cause by Denuvo lets say 70 years later you want to play an old game.
Chancces are you won’t be able to play it due to Denuvo without a modification or crack, or even if you just never pay yfor internet again and change your hardware.
Denuvo is bad peoplel need to stop throwing their money at game companies using Denuvo.
Another reason not to buy games on day 1.. or even year 1. Game of the year edition = tons of DLC, patches, fixes, works perfectly and its cheaper lol ;p
KKW is back. Why didn’t you vote?
It’s probably “computer-day” in his mental institute.
PS: KIM don’t answer, I “block” you.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e9d7491ccaca3db34d14c2315ca549a6ff6e7f659cbce674d44469ee5d37b270.jpg
Kadalien:”It’s not denuvo,it’s bla..bla..bla..”
.
.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/df6ad9ce120f3525e4af25b32fb61e3ca6c95b729407853812121ab96adec828.gif
Well, sh*tty developers and ancient API equals a sh*tty game. It’s just pure logical math people!
Oh so you mean it literally has the SAME rampant performance issues that Origins did 5 minutes ago?
Remind me why I didn’t buy it yet? Oh, right.