Capcom's anti-tamper measures might be causing Resident Evil Village's poor PC performance

Unhappy Resident Evil Village players are blaming DRM for the game's poor performance on PC.

"All in-game shutters like the one from when you kill a zombie are fixed because Capcom DRM's entry points are patched out so most of their functions are never executed anymore," explained hacker Empress, who claims playing a pirated version of the game without Capcom's anti-tamper V3 and Denuvo V11 "results in [a] much smoother game experience".

DSO Gaming tested the theory for themselves and played a two-hour snippet of a cracked version. Despite killing numerous enemies, they said they "did not get a single stutter during these two hours".

"Even the catacombs at Lady Dimitrescu's castle, an area notorious for its stuttering issues when killing enemies, was stutter-free," the report insists.

"We loved Resident Evil Village on consoles, but unfortunately, [our] opinion of the PC port isn't quite so positive," Digital Foundry surmised back when Resident Evil Village was released.

"On the one hand, I love what the RE Engine is doing technologically and the game itself is fantastic, but on the other hand, I'm genuinely puzzled and disappointed by some of the design choices, bugs, glitches and performance problems. This conversion really isn't where it should be right now."

ICYMI, Capcom has now sold 4.5m copies of Resident Evil Village. That's a steady uptick from the last couple of sales milestones announced by the publisher - 3m at launch in May, then up to 4m after 20 days.

Village's predecessor Resident Evil 7 has shifted 9m copies since its launch in 2017, though only sold 3.5m after nine weeks. Village is selling faster, then, and looks on track to potentially overtake RE7 as the biggest-selling entry in the series.