Intel: PC Games Are Incompatible with 'Alder Lake' CPUs Due to DRM
pcmag.com
pcmag.com
So that's what scroll lock does. Mystery solved.
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Wouldn't be easier to set compatibility on an executable to only use P-cores? If I remember correctly, Windows can set compatibility settings for known programs automatically.
I'm surprised the article didn't say if Denuvo had a fix yet. It also sounds like Microsoft may implement a fix in Windows. That sounds like the most likely solution if Intel or the BIOS couldn't address it.
Also Denuvo seems to get the most use from higher budget games, which gives some hope that the game studios have the resources to fix it. I think they will want to be able to get the long tail of sales that comes from steam sales etc.
In contrast the macOS game market is (and even more so at the time) a lot smaller, the 32-bit switch mostly impacted older (at the time) games and impacted everyone equally.
I think I'm still just surprised how the 32-bit thing played out. Apple only sold 32-bit Intel processors in 2005-2006. Steam was ported to macOS in 2010--well after 64-bit was established. They started giving warnings in 2018 and dropped support in 2019. Just recently I was trying to figure out how to play vanilla Half Life 2 and ended up installing High Sierra because that was the best solution I had.
> The errors occur because Denuvo’s DRM software will mistakenly think the so-called "Performance-cores" and "Efficiency-cores" (P-cores and E-cores) on the chip belong to two separate PCs, when in reality the two types of processing cores are running on the same Alder Lake processor. (This P-core/E-core design is a new trait of Intel's chips with Alder Lake.)
To me that's copy-protection employed by each game on it's own. They just happen to be using DRM library software from a vendor. It has nothing to do with Intel & DRM or specs of any kind, it's whatever the software vendor thought would work.
Alternatively, DRM software (not just games), should have a perpetual refund period that covers "DRM or server obsolescence." This is something that I could really see EU passing.
This would oblige a DRM removal patch.
This seems like it would still be an issue if the company providing the game goes out of business. I've bought games from both PlayFirst and AmbrosiaSW and even after buying the games, the servers that verify registration no longer exist or work. It's disappointing that awesome and fun games aren't able to be played because they can't phone home.
Online activation and tracking number of installs per license seems to work just fine. And there's something to be said for "risk" as a "cost of doing business". I mean, we certainly pay for imagined risk (insurance, healthcare, legal fees, warrantees, cost of customer support, etc. all factored into product cost).
This reminds me of the Turbo button on my old PC/AT machine, which would clock the processor down from 10MHz to 6MHz, to run PC/XT games.
So what are these users expected to do, shell out another keyboard? Thank god for AMD, help us if they follow this obsolescence path.