In an interesting turn of events, CI Games has completely removed Denuvo from Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3. Now as you may be aware, a lot of gamers still believe that Denuvo introduces a big performance hit in games, even though we’ve already seen a number of Denuvo-powered titles performing extremely well. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Injustice 2, Mad Max and DOOM are four great examples. As such, we’ve decided to re-test the latest Denuvo-free version of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3.

Let’s start with some good news; the loading times have been reduced significantly. We don’t know whether this is due to some further optimizations or due to the removal of the Denuvo anti-tamper tech. The point is that the game now loads faster.

Unfortunately, though, the game still suffers from major performance issues. On our test machine (Intel i7 4930K overclocked at 4.2Ghz with 8GB RAM, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, Windows 10 64-bit and the latest version of the GeForce drivers) we did not notice any performance gains at all.

As we’ve said in our PC Performance Analysis article, the game initially ran with a minimum framerate of 42fps and an average framerate of 64fps at 1080p on Very High settings. And, unfortunately, there are still drops to 41-48fps even in this latest version of the game. Below you can find some screenshots showcasing the game’s underwhelming performance.

To be honest, this does not really surprise us. After all, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3 has always been a GPU-bound title. As such, the removal of Denuvo (an anti-tamper tech that could theoretically affect the CPU instead of the GPU) should not introduce any performance improvements. And that’s exactly what we are experiencing here.

It will be interesting to see a CPU-bound game, like Watch_Dogs 2 or Assassin’s Creed Origins, without the Denuvo anti-tamper tech. Unfortunately, though, Ubisoft does not plan to remove Denuvo from its titles anytime soon. And since the Denuvo cracks are basically bypassing this security tech (meaning that Denuvo is still running in the background), we won’t be able to measure the performance difference even if – and when – these titles get cracked.

But anyway, the conclusion here is that there are no performance gains at all between the Denuvo and the Denuvo-free versions of Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3. The game still suffers from performance issues and we are pretty sure that CI Games will not be able to resolve them. After all, this game came out in May 2017 and performs exactly the same, eight whole months since its release.