Whatever your thoughts on the use of digital rights management to protect games against piracy, you probably don't want any DRM solution to actually have a negative impact on the performance of the game or your computer ( SecuROM, anyone ?). Now, though, crackers are alleging that Denuvo's DRM protection is causing performance issues in Rime, accusations the DRM maker and game maker both deny.

In a readme file accompanying the crack for the game, a cracker going by the handle Baldman says the Denuvo protection "now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing game down. In previous games like [Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3], Nier, Prey there were only about 1-2 'triggers' called every several minutes during gameplay, so do the math."

Speaking to Kotaku , a Denuvo spokesperson flatly denied that the DRM was having a negative impact on the game's performance. "Prior to release, we performed benchmark testing on the protected vs. unprotected versions of Rime. There was no performance impact on the version that is protected with Denuvo anti-tamper vs. the unprotected version."

The Rime developers at Grey Box gave some more qualified pushback against the performance impact accusations in a lengthy blog post. "The only thing that Denuvo is currently doing for us is checking to make certain that Steam’s (or Origin's) DRM is still attached to the game," the team writes. "There is a small performance hit associated with this, but at this time we do not believe it is causing the problems that are currently being reported. We might be wrong. We’re monitoring the situation."

While we can't independently verify Baldman's claims, reviewers and players have complained of long load times and frame rate issues with the game. In any case, now that the game has been cracked, Grey Box has followed through on an earlier promise and released an updated version that removes Denuvo from Rime. That move apes the example of earlier Denuvo-cleaned games like Doom and Inside , which also dropped the protection after cracks were found. Other games, like Mass Effect Andromeda merely updated the Denuvo protection once workarounds were found for the initial version.

Anecdotal before-and-after comparisons of the old and new versions of Rime from message board users "didn't notice much of an FPS difference" but also suggest that maybe "the game definitely loads much faster now, well, at least for me." We'll keep an eye out for more reliable and specific tests and let you know what we hear.