PC players have complained that the Assassin's Creed: Origins CPU usage has been too much, sometimes going up to as high as 100 percent.
The problem has been attributed to the two layers of anti-piracy measures that Ubisoft has implemented to the game. The publisher, however, has denied the claim.
'Assassin's Creed: Origins' High CPU Usage Blamed On Anti-Piracy Measures
A report by TorrentFreak outlined cases of high CPU usage for Assassin's Creed: Origins, with one gamer getting between 60 percent to 90 percent usage on a PC with an Intel Core i7 processor and another game seeing a 100 percent load on all four cores of his Intel Core i5 processor, even at lower graphics settings.
According to game cracker Voksi, the reason behind the problematic CPU usage is due to the anti-piracy measures that have been implemented for Assassin's Creed: Origins. In addition to the Denuvo anti-piracy technology, Ubisoft decided to implement VMProtect.
The combination reduces the game's performance by 30 percent to 40 percent, Voksi said, requiring players to have high-end PCs if they want to be able to play the game. In some instances, some PCs crash into the blue screen of death after running the game for an hour or two, due to overheating.
"It's anti-consumer and a disgusting move," Voksi said. While the Denuvo-VMProtect combination better protects the game against piracy, it does so at the expense of legitimate gamers.
Ubisoft Denies Allegations Against 'Assassin's Creed: Origins' Anti-Piracy Measures
Ubisoft strongly denied the allegations against Denuvo and VMProtect, claiming in a statement that the anti-piracy measures implemented in the PC version of Assassin's Creed: Origins "have no perceptible effect on game performance."
The publisher then implied that Assassin's Creed: Origins might simply be too much for some machines, as it utilizes the full extent of the minimum and recommended PC system requirements to render ancient Egypt without loading screens.
It is well known that Denuvo places extra strain on computers, so it is hard to think that adding VMProtect on top of it will not affect the performance of the game at all.
What now? Taking into consideration Ubisoft's response, there are now two plausible explanations for the high CPU usage of Assassin's Creed: Origins. Either its anti-piracy measures are dragging down its performance, or the game is simply too massive for most computers to play properly.
In both cases, Ubisoft is at fault, which is a shame considering the potential of Assassin's Creed: Origins.
