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!