Resident Evil 4 PC players are getting angry over a change implemented by publisher Capcom: the company has changed DRM systems in order to, at least in its intention, beef up its security against tampering, piracy and other shenanigans.
However, the new system has instead created processing bottlenecks to the point of 2 millisecond (ms) loss in processing power. By itself, the number may seem small, but PC-oriented players will tell you that this can cause major graphical drops, like a game going from over 200 frames per second (fps) to under 150 fps in an instant.
The tests were done by Digital Foundry, who also brought the hypothesis that Capcom is using current products to test out new tech, despite the player’s PC performance. The conclusion comes by Capcom’s own history: both Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil Village suffered from a decrease in performance for its PC versions — all of which came after changes in DRM settings or services.
How is Resident Evil 4 DRM tech impacting PC performance
Resident Evil 4 had a system known as Denuvo DRM, the implementation of which was responsible for Resident Evil 2 and Village’s bottlenecks before being optimized. Now, Resident Evil 4 has implemented a new platform called Enigma Protector DRM. The thing is, the installation is mandatory, kicking off as soon as the game starts on a PC.
Granted, Digital Foundry ran their tests in CPU-limited scenarios, not GPU-limited. In layman’s terms, the tests were performed in a context where a hi-end video card (such as NVidia’s RTX-4070) was applied in a machine that executed the game in regular resolutions (720p, for instance). That way, the GPU card has more than enough power to handle most if not all processing demand, thus, the only bottleneck that shows up has to be from the processing chip (CPU, like AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600).
In tests made the other way around — that being GPU-limited — there were little to no changes in performance, which reinforces the conclusion of raw processing power being limited. And since the only change the game itself had was the new DRM implementation, it stands to reason that that is the problem.
It is worth mentioning that the latest game in the franchise, Resident Evil Requiem, which is due for release on February 27th, 2026, will still use Denuvo, not Eclipse, so it could be that Resident Evil 4 is merely a testing ground for optimization.
So far, Capcom has not come forward to comment on the situation. Meanwhile, players suggest you look for mods in order to stop Eclipse from taking place: there is one, specific mod just for that, in fact.
