Capcom appears to have removed the controversial Denuvo DRM from the PC version of "Devil May Cry 5" less than a year after its release.

In a patch released on February 6 and discovered by Reddit user MostafaOmara, Denuvo was removed from the game entirely. When this DRM was applied to the game, it has been blamed for causing a number of problems, including slow performance due to high CPU usage and shortened SSD life.

While many of these accusations are debatable, DMC5 is in the unique position of having had two builds with and without Denuvo for a time. Thanks to a hiccup in Steam's branch management at the game's launch, people were able to compare performance and found that the build without Denuvo ran, on average, 25% faster than the corresponding build with DRM. In real-world terms, that means an improvement of about 20 FPS.

Over the past few years, Denuvo has been used more as a way to stop early piracy of games than as standard DRM. Many publishers use Denuvo only for the first few months of a game and then patch it at a later date when the rush to torrent the game has subsided. Capcom, in particular, is no stranger to this approach, having removed Denuvo from "Resident Evil 2" and "Resident Evil 7" in the past.

Even with Denuvo, DMC5 is still an absolutely fantastic game, with a review by Tom Senior calling it "one of the best fight games on PC."