Based on this, I think it’s a combination of factors. Besides the periodic runtime checks to verify your hardware fingerprint, it also does on-the-fly decryption of some values, and apparently does weird things with the stack. The decryption could have a big impact on memory consumption and performance, depending on the amount of data.
That post says the performance impact in Hogwarts Legacy is negligible (even if their technique for measuring is imperfect), but I suspect that Denuvo is configurable by the dev. Maybe Capcom raised the slider up to 11, but WB kept it lower?
Based on this, I think it’s a combination of factors. Besides the periodic runtime checks to verify your hardware fingerprint, it also does on-the-fly decryption of some values, and apparently does weird things with the stack. The decryption could have a big impact on memory consumption and performance, depending on the amount of data.
That post says the performance impact in Hogwarts Legacy is negligible (even if their technique for measuring is imperfect), but I suspect that Denuvo is configurable by the dev. Maybe Capcom raised the slider up to 11, but WB kept it lower?