Capcom is taking heat from PC players after a new Resident Evil 4 Remake update sparked a wave of angry reviews, largely due to a controversial change in DRM. The patch swaps out Denuvo for Enigma Protector, and players say the shift comes with a major downside: noticeably worse performance.
At the center of the backlash is a long-running complaint in PC gaming—that DRM often hits legitimate buyers harder than it stops piracy. That argument feels especially sharp here because Resident Evil 4 Remake has been cracked for a long time, meaning pirates likely won’t feel the impact the same way paying customers do. What players are experiencing instead is a real-world performance penalty, with some reports claiming frame rate drops in the 20% to 50% range after the update.
What changed, exactly? Capcom replaced Denuvo with Enigma Protector, a cheaper DRM solution that has appeared in other Capcom releases in the past. Enigma Protector was previously used in the Resident Evil 4 Remake demo and was later added to Resident Evil Revelations after its Denuvo protection expired. For many fans, this looks less like an upgrade and more like a cost-cutting move that makes the game run worse—another example in a list of past DRM-related performance frustrations tied to Capcom PC ports.
Some of the early panic also centered on the idea that the update was meant to target mods. However, prominent modder FluffyQuack has argued that mod support isn’t the main issue for most players. Popular tools and frameworks still work, including REFramework, and the majority of cosmetic mods installed through Fluffy Mod Manager remain functional. Only a smaller portion of mods are affected by this kind of DRM shift, and those are typically the sort that can be fixed after mod creators update their work.
The bigger problem appears to be raw performance, especially on lower-power systems. Steam Deck users, in particular, are reporting some of the most painful losses—up to around a 30% FPS drop in certain cases. That’s a serious hit for a platform where the game previously ran comfortably around 40–50 FPS on Medium settings for many players. After the DRM change, some users say the game’s CPU load or VRAM demands push it over the edge, making it harder to stay above 30 FPS consistently.
On higher-end PCs, the results seem more mixed, but still not encouraging. Testing referenced by FluffyQuack showed more variability depending on the situation, yet still found that performance could be up to 20% better with Denuvo than with Enigma—matching the general direction of many player reports even if some claims are higher.
Now players are urging Capcom to rethink the decision. The most straightforward fix, many argue, would be to remove DRM entirely—something Capcom has done before with Resident Evil 2 Remake and Resident Evil 3 Remake. Since the game is already cracked, the update so far mostly creates frustration for people who actually bought it, while only slightly inconveniencing pirates and a small segment of mod users. For a PC release that was widely considered a solid port, fans don’t want to see performance sacrificed for copy protection that no longer meaningfully protects the game.
