Binary instrumentation and recompilation of game logic to improve performance.

Fancy title, I know.

I have been interested in recompilation of game logic for specific processors for a while now.

It's probably a no brainer that games are compiled with generic compiler settings for a generic x86 processor, rather than optimizing for a specific microarchitecture(for obvious reasons).
It's also a no brainer that Intel beats AMD in performance when it comes to microarches prior to Zen. This makes a lot of old processors "useless" for gaming as games become more complex and thus require more CPU processing.

But what if you could either reduce or optimize a certain CPU intensive part of the logic so that it executes faster.

I understand that most games today might be more graphically intensive and thus require more GPU horsepower, and thus overclocking the GPU may provide more performance gain, but this won't be the case forever I think.

Battlefield 1 for PC has horrible performance, even on my i5-4670k. It requires so much CPU cycles, that the GPU is actually starved of data. DICE should fix this, but they haven't.

Useless post.

Going to dig in a bit. Presumably what I am looking at is the Origin DRM, so what I am looking at is not Denuvo. And yes, that is a (useless) screenshot of the first thing I see when I load up an Origin game in x64dbg. So it's nothing special.

Quite frankly, I am angry, the shitposting on reddit regarding Denuvo, the false promises, the contradicting information of what Denuvo does, how it works etc.
How about I post what I find in addition to screenshots(or videos?) that at least proves/disproves something or sheds some light on the functionality.

Might take a look at Unravel.

Unlike the other games, this one seems interesting as I want to play it. It uses Denuvo. This shouldn't be interpreted as if I am going to crack it, that will likely be impossible as I have never studied Denuvo moreover x64dbg still lacks a tracer and the underlying TitanEngine engine is wonky(aka the tools aren't mature enough;no offense mrexodia).

Denuvo and VMProtect are the same?

Recently I've been reading on Denuvo, and how certain code seems not similar but identical to that of VMProtect. Russian websites are also saying that Denuvo<=>VMProtect indicating that perhaps the two companies are sharing the same code base. That certain features in VMProtect appear in Denuvo and disappear in VMProtect, and vice-versa.

Here is the article in question (Russian).

Just Cause 3 and Denuvo

So apparently the same thing is happening with JC3 that happened with FIFA15 and DAI.

The founder of notorious Chinese cracking forum 3DM is warning that given the current state of anti-piracy technology, in two years there might be no more pirate games to play. The claims come after attempts to breach the Denuvo security protecting Just Cause 3 pushed the group's cracking expert to breaking point.

Do you know what drives technological innovation? Competition! Right now anti-tamper/DRM solutions are being sought because of piracy, and get broken, which forces the authors to come up with new and interesting ways to prevent their solution from being broken.

The same cannot be said from "our" side, us reverse engineers. Most people keep their tools private and we have a stagnation of publicly available tools to help us combat these new solutions and techniques.
Do you know why? Money, Denuvo is paid, cracking is something people do for free of charge, there is little incentive to release their internal tools or to release docs or even bother .

Until then, this "prediction" of 3DM might have some merit.

More games to use the new Denuvo DRM

Dragon Age Inquisition.

Lords of the Fallen.

And as a reminder, no there is no crack yet for FIFA15, thus there will be no crack for either of these games, till Denuvo has been researched and defeated, if at all.

Also, I have no ETA on cracks, I am not affiliated with scene groups, I am just a guy that likes RE as a hobby, but I find this protection a pain in the ass already, even though I've never worked with it.

FIFA15 and the new DRM Denuvo

So at first I speculated it had SecuROM, just like FIFA14, but then we(when I say "we" I do mean the internet) find out it has a new DRM called Denuvo and this is why there is no crack yet, it's new and it will take time for it to be studied and bypassed, and maybe the rather low chance of there being no crack at all.
It took me 30 days just to run SecuROM under a debugger, so it's not unlikely the same thing to happen with a new DRM.

I've no idea what Denuvo employs, frankly I do not care, but if it gains traction and remains uncracked, things will get "interesting".

To say this in simple words, there is no crack yet, any crack you do find googling will likely turn out to be a virus.

Addendum: The upcoming GTA V game will also use this DRM. Seems like GTA V will not use Denuvo afterall, http://www.incgamers.com/2014/11/grand-theft-auto-v-will-not-use-denuvo-drm-says-company-co-owner

Spotcheck/Triggers in SecuROM.

Spotcheck/Triggers are what the developer of SecuROM, Robert Yates, calls the piece of code which is responsible for altering the game if tampering of any kind is detected.

Altering like making the final boss in Crysis 3 invincible, or making the ball in Fifa 14 unusually large. These are not bugs/glitches, they are intentional. They are, however not always caused by tampering with the game, but sometimes because of an installation gone wrong with the game, and usually a reinstall should resolve this. Worst case scenario, it's because of some piece of malware running on the system.

Once I was able to run the game under a debugger, it would suddenly get terminated after a while. I identified two threads that were responsible for this and brutally killed them, this didn't affect the game and it was no longer being terminated.