Enigma replaced Denuvo in the remake, and PC frame rates fell

Removing Denuvo turned out to be a swap, not a cleanup. The same day, players found another protection in Resident Evil 4 Remake, The Enigma Protector, and quickly reported frame rates falling by as much as half, even on strong PCs.

Steam posts describe the same pattern: the game leans harder on the CPU and uses the graphics card less. An owner of a Core i9-12900K and an RTX 4070 Ti wrote that GPU use dropped from about 98% to 60%. Another went from 90–100 frames to 50–60. A third estimated losses up to 50% even in scenes that had not been CPU-bound before.

Capcom had not commented on the swap when those reports appeared. The thread is on Steam for app 2050650, which is the remake.

For a three-year-old single-player game, trading one DRM scheme for another that cuts the frame rate looked odd. Older protection is usually taken out by that point, not replaced with something that costs performance.