Atomic Heart has arrived this week after a long wait. Mundfish’s work has divided the community and the press, although his colleague Alberto Pastor seems to have been happy with the game based on his analysis. Apart from having a good performance on PC, as we verified yesterday in the game optimization guide, Atomic Heart includes denuvoand this is the performance we lose with that.
Like any great modern release, Denuvo anti-piracy software is the perfect accompaniment. There’s already been a lot of discussion about how this impediment to pirates affects the games of those who buy it legally, and Atomic Heart today proves that we lose around 10 FPS on average.
Content creator BTAORAY GAMING’s test on YouTube compares gameplay with and without Denuvo on a system with a RTX 3070a Ryzen 3700X and 16GB of RAM. With this system, and despite the fact that there are times when neither of them exceeds 90 FPS, the difference is noticeable in the busiest moments of the game.
There are sequences where the Atomic Heart with Denuvo suffers certain lows and it stays at 70 FPS compared to almost 100 images per second without Denuvo. Even so, an extremely important detail must be taken into account and that can ruin this test: it is comparing a leaked version of the game with the final build.
The game has not been hacked as far as we know, so this test cannot be done based on the same version of the game. The build leaked belongs to a version from November 2022, when the game prior to the delay was originally going to come out, that is, a raw version with 4 months less work of polished and optimization.
That is why we cannot take this test into account, despite the fact that an important difference is seen. Of course, all that glitters is not gold, and it is that the filtered version without Denuvo is considerably worse optimized. In the playable sequences, Attomic Heart suffers with stuttering in both versions, although it is more noticeable in the November version.
Be that as it may, he impact Denuvo is not unknown to the PC gamer. What we can say is that there is performance that we lose just by its simple presence, and that is that the software is in charge of verifying the game on the hard drive, which implies more resources invested in it.
We have already commented that the game works perfectly even on a system other than the typical high configurations of the PC. However, we know nothing about Ray Tracing. The game was promoted with this technology, and as of February 22, the game does not feature this visual enhancement anywhere.
