Thread by @bsthlc

god, i hate denuvo.

so denuvo obfuscates functions in the game executable, right? presumably to add legibility checks into them. but this comes with a performance cost, and I got an extreme case that I want to talk about

project diva mega mix+ is infamous for having an extremely slow leftover debug mode that drops your FPS to single digits. see the video. i thought this was the developers trolling us but it doesn't seem to be the case

i started to get convinced this was due to denuvo and started looking into the code to see if I could find any obfuscated functions, and I found this one liner from the original version of the game. denuvo obfuscated this so HARD that it was taking several milliseconds to execute

this function gets called each time the UI elements want to set their color, so it kept getting stacked up and ruin the FPS. after rewriting similar other denuvo infected functions, the FPS hit still happens but not as bad. there are probably more I need to rewrite

my assumption is that denuvo does profiling while the game is being played to see which functions get called the most. hot paths don't get obfuscated, functions that are barely or never called get severe obfuscation. debug mode got the worst of it as it's never accessible

i'd guess the game's stupid stutters are due to this. not thoroughly profiled parts of the game get obfuscated a lot causing these performance issues... but again this is just a pure guess as I absolutely have no idea what goes into denuvo proceedings lol

see ya again when I have another BS to show or complain about

typo in first tweet, i didn't mean to say legibility, i mean like checking whether you own the game legally