‘Total War: Warhammer 3’ fans say Denuvo patch has harmed performance

Anti-piracy software Denuvo has been added to Total War: Warhammer 3 at launch, and players of the game allege that it’s causing noticeable performance issues.

Yesterday (February 17) marked the release of Total War: Warhammer 3, however it’s been marred by negative reviews criticising the game’s performance.

The strategy title currently has a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam, with 41 per cent of the game’s reviews being negative at time of writing. The majority of these negative reviews focus solely on facing performance issues within the game.

Now, many players are pointing fingers at Denuvo, anti-piracy software that SteamDB shows was added in a patch on Total War: Warhammer 3‘s launch day. A technical review by PC Invasion has compared performance benchmarking from before and after launch day, and found that their FPS dropped from 52.8 FPS to 37 on high settings and 126.7 to 59.8 on low. The site does not mention whether Denuvo is to blame or not.

However, several of the game’s negative Steam reviews specificly call out Denuvo, with one critical review stating that “as long as Denuvo stays, thumbs down will stay.”

Another added that “Denuvo included. Refund requested,” and said that “performance was choppy and pretty rough.”

The addition of Denuvo has also been called out in the game’s Reddit community, where threads with thousand of upvotes express frustration with the DRM software.

In the past, Denuvo has been heavily criticised for having a negative impact on performance in other PC games. Back in 2018, ExtremeTech investigated this and found that Denuvo genuinely does have a negative impact on gaming performance.

Outside of performance issues, Total War: Warhammer 3 is also being review bombed due to criticism surrounding Sega’s handling of the game’s marketing in China.

In other gaming news, The Legend Of Zelda: Majora’s Mask is coming to the Nintendo Switch next week, and a new trailer for the Switch version has been released.