Final Fantasy 15: Denuvo offenbar ohne Einfluss auf PC-Performance

I don't fall into one camp or the other when it comes to Denuvo, I don't agree in general with DRM, but I'd also like Denuvo not to impact performance. Here's just my take on the methodology of the testing.
Firstly, a Release is often expected to run better than a Beta, but that can't really be proven one way or another. The Demo was close to release, so it's expected to be a near-final Build, and if it was optimised in later builds is unknown. All we know is that the version number of the Demo was lower than Release.
The thing that stood out most, is that Durante used the Highest settings in-game, for these tests. This is a problem because the Demo and Release scale differently on the same in-game settings. This is why a lot of people think the Release version "runs better at the same settings", it's technically not - the settings are just scaled down slightly.
For example, the Highest setting for Model LOD in the Demo is actually slightly (22%) higher than in the Release version and is partially CPU bound. Likewise Shadow Distance Scaling is set quite a bit higher in the Demo at the Highest setting, than it is in Release, we don't know exactly how much on ShadowDistanceScaling because it doesn't appear in the config anymore and isn't obeyed by the engine when forced in there, but it's about 100 in-game Feet. It's a setting bound almost entirely to the CPU.
There are other aspects to the graphics pipeline that are also different between the two, such as High Precision Rendering (64 bit precision) being enabled in the Demo, and not in the Release, again this is mostly a CPU bound setting.
Even despite these discrepancies - which all favour the Release version, looking at all of the charts we can see that on average (particularly for the lower-end CPU), the Release is struggling a bit more than the Demo and load times are verifiably faster in the Demo. Now, if this is due to Denuvo or not I have no idea, like I said this is just my take on the methodology of the testing. I would be happy knowing that it doesn't impact performance however, but I don't think this quiteee proves it.
Having said that it's still a fairly fair test.

HarleyQuinn_RS comments on Tested: Denuvo DRM has no performance impact on Final Fantasy 15

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