The cracked version of Resident Evil Village runs better, testing confirms

Original story: An interesting claim appeared over the weekend: that a cracked version of Resident Evil Village not only bypasses Capcom's DRM, but runs better than the Steam version. The tech reporters at Digital Foundry put that claim to the test, comparing Resident Evil Village's normal and cracked versions, and what do you know, it's true: The pirated version doesn't stutter like the retail version, Digital Foundry says.

For the most part, the two executables perform identically, as DF's Rich Leadbetter explains in the video embedded above. To be clear, the cracked version does not deliver an overall frame rate increase. At certain moments, however, the time it takes to render a frame suddenly spikes in the retail version, causing a noticeable pause, or a stutter. Digital Foundry shows that this stuttering does not happen at all in the cracked version, suggesting that DRM processes are occasionally interfering with Resident Evil Village's ability to render new frames. 

The inconsistency looks particularly annoying in combat: In its video, DF shows the screen momentarily halting the moment an enemy is hit. The site says that the same issue does not appear in the console versions.

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