Recently, Ranger Network reported the news that "Watch Dogs: Legion" was cracked, which triggered a heated discussion among netizens. The "Watchdog: Legion" was cracked by "EMPRESS", and the PC version of the game used a total of 5 DRM protection measures, including the new version of Denuvo V10.0, VMProtect v3.5.1, uPlay R2, BattlEye, etc., which also led to its less than ideal operation on the mid-range CPU.
So it's interesting to see if the game's performance improves after cracking. Foreign media dsogaming today conducted a game performance run test on the cracked version of "Watch Dogs: Legion", let's take a look at it!
The PC configured for foreign media is Intel i9 9900K/16GB DDR4 (3800Mhz)/RTX 3080/Windows 10 64-bit, and the configuration can be said to be very powerful. As we know, the EMPRESS crack is most likely a bypass for the five-fold DRM protection, which means that these DRM protections may still be running in the background. However, considering that Resident Evil 8: The Village and Assassin's Creed: Origins performed better after being cracked, foreign media also wanted to see how Watch Dogs: Legion performed.
These DRM protection measures mainly affect the performance of the CPU, so the foreign media decided to use the 1080p/DLSS (quality)/maximum quality (Ultra) setting for running score test.
The test results show that when ray tracing is turned on, the PC under the above configuration can not stably run the game at 60 frames, but the average frame number of the game still reaches 71 frames, but in some scenes, the frame number drops by more than 50 frames, and the foreign media speculates that it is due to the bandwidth / frequency of the memory that restricts the ray tracing effect, because the CPU and GPU running pressure are not large.
With ray tracing turned off, both versions (cracked and uncracked) achieved a stable 60-frame experience. Even as you race through the city at high speed (and create chaos), the game can still maintain a smooth experience.
As the chart shows, the performance of retail, digital, and cracked/pirated games doesn't differ much, it's basically the same. Although foreign media encountered two or three game lags during the 10-minute retail/digital version of the game trial, this is also within the acceptable error frequency range.
The final conclusion is a bit surprising, unlike the cracked version of Resident Evil 8 and Assassin's Creed: Origins, the performance performance after the cracking of Watchdog: Legion has not improved at all, it is really a lonely play, so everyone still plays the genuine version (funny expression).