No, cracked versions of Resident Evil Requiem aren't performing better than the official game — but there are still issues with DRM

Despite inital fears, Resident Evil Requiem pirated versions don't perform better than retail version
There were suspicions that gamers who bought Requiem were getting worse performance with Denuvo DRM
There is still no Denuvo-less version of Resident Evil Requiem

Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem is among a long list of modern triple-A games from numerous popular studios using Denuvo DRM to prevent piracy, which is notorious for its performance impact on games — but that's not the case this time around, at least for now.

As widely reported, Resident Evil Requiem has been cracked with the piracy scene 'voices38', and via the Hypervisor Denuvo bypass. Despite reports suggesting so, there are no noticeable performance differences between the cracked versions and the retail version, as highlighted on Reddit.

These cracks don't actually remove Denuvo; instead, they trick Denuvo into believing the user is running a legitimate game copy, hence the term 'bypass'. In that case, it remains unclear whether Denuvo's presence is indeed holding back performance, as there's still no Denuvo-less version of Requiem.

As a matter of fact, there are only rare cases where pirated games have Denuvo completely stripped by piracy scenes, with a prime example being Assassin's Creed Origins by 'Codex', and other games having Denuvo removed by the developer itself.

Comment from r/PiratedGames

Leon reloading the Redemption weapon — (Image credit: Future / Isaiah Williams / Capcom)

Since Requiem is already cracked, we may see Denuvo officially removed from the game sooner than we expected. Fortunately, though, performance in Requiem isn't a significant concern to begin with, as it's quite well optimized to run at good frame rates on a wide range of hardware.

However, DRM like Denuvo for games has previously been proven to be detrimental to performance, and Capcom's Resident Evil 4 remake is a prime example.

The Japanese developer added Enigma DRM to replace Denuvo in the game earlier in February, which significantly spoiled performance on all PC configurations, before going on to remove it after heavy backlash — and that's for a game that was pirated months after its March 2023 launch.

It's also worth noting that while Denuvo doesn't always spoil performance in games, it can easily lock SteamOS (or any other Linux distro) users out of a game for 24 hours when switching Proton modes (which is required for certain games and their functionality).

There's no denying that Denuvo and other DRMs are very unpopular among gamers, and for well-justified reasons — but so far, Requiem consumers don't have an unfair performance disadvantage to pirated versions to worry about.