While some players had no problems with the performance of Resident Evil Village on PC, others have reported regular stuttering, especially when swarms of flies appear during boss fights and enemies grab the player to go in for a bite, as well as during cutscenes, when enemies die, and in the market area of the village.
A pirated version of RE8 by cracker Empress claims to have fixed these problems by bypassing the Denuvo DRM. Empress’s notes on the crack say, “All in-game shutters like the one from when you kill a zombie are fixed because Capcom DRM’s enty [sic] points are patched out so most of their functions are never executed anymore” and “the worst is that their DRM was fully obfuscated in Denuvo’s VM making it run even slower.”
You can see the differences in performance illustrated in the video above, in which the cracked game runs much more smoothly. However, it’s worth noting a couple of things. The first is that the two sources were captured with different versions of Nvidia’s GPU drivers installed—the retail version is being played with 466.63, and the cracked version is running on 471.11, which was released 19 days later. More significantly, the cracked version is completely missing the vampire’s bite animations, and according to the YouTuber who captured the footage other boss attacks are absent as well.