On Friday, the highly anticipated Assassin’s Creed: Origins launched and while for the most part, the game has been getting praise, some PC users have been a bit unhappy. At the moment, Assassin’s Creed Origins exhibits high CPU usage, which was initially pinned down to Ubisoft’s developers making full use of available resources on PC. However, according to a particular game cracker, the situation is different, as apparently AC: Origins uses two levels of DRM, causing an additional strain on PC hardware.

This information is coming from Voksi, who is part of the ‘Revolt’ cracking team that previously cracked Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Voksi says that Assassin’s Creed Origins is running a version of VMProtect on top of Denuvo’s anti-tamper code. This is apparently increasing CPU usage by an additional 30-40%. This isn’t necessarily an issue for users of the Core i7/Ryzen 7 and beyond, but it can be an issue for those running on a smaller number of cores with no Hyper Threading.

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It seems that Ubisoft may have been spooked by the recent string of Denuvo cracks, which have been coming in at a much faster rate throughout 2017. In order to bolster Denuvo and keep the game piracy free for a bit longer, Ubisoft added VMProtect on top to stop crackers from reverse-engineering Denuvo.

With that in mind, Assassin’s Creed Origins is going to be difficult to crack and may end up protected for a longer period of time. However, it seems to be coming at a performance cost that some PC players won’t be happy about.