Dead Space

[Original Review, edit at bottom] Until Denuvo is removed from this game, i cannot recommend anyone spend their money on it. Really, dont spend your money on ANY game with Denuvo. I've got a 3080ti and a 5800x, regardless of resolution or tier of graphical fidelity, the game struggled to run at a stable 60 fps and constantly dipped down into the 20s as new areas, textures, models, and ambience were unencrypted and loaded. [i]Tried a few different SSDs as well, thinking it was read/write speed related, but frame drops remained. Its the only game in my library with DRM, and its the only game on my PC to do this.[/i] Unacceptable in the big '26- it was unacceptable in '23 when this game released. Its insane to me that EA cares THAT much about "preventing piracy" that they're willing to kneecap the experience on PC to "worse than console" levels of performance. Visually, this game is incredible. Gameplay, i can tell the devs put a LOT of effort in. I would LOVE to actually play and enjoy the game but constant dips to unplayable framerates has killed any joy I would have gotten from this game. As usual, EA is a blight on the industry and needs to be done away with. They do NOT care about the end user experience, just making money. Denuvo is constantly fighting with the game for system resources to decrypt the files the game is calling for, making playing any game with Denuvo more of a chore than anything else. I shouldn't need a 12+ core CPU to play video games because said video game need to decrypt their assets [b]while they're being loaded[/b]. Rather than fighting enemies you're fighting frame drops. "Wait, i need to sit here for 30 seconds in this open door or else my framerate will be too low to deal with the swarm of enemies which'll rush me after I get halfway through this room." If Denuvo decrypted the assets BEFORE I load into the game and start playing, like while the game is launching before getting to the main menu, this wouldn't be a problem- but that's not how Denuvo works. Denuvo works to be as inefficient as possible by maximizing encryption layers and therefore maximizing system resource utilization during decryption. [b][i]F*ck Denuvo, and F*ck any game studio or publisher which thinks they're doing a good thing for themselves by incorporating Denuvo into their game. Denuvo CAUSES piracy, not prevents it. I've never wanted to torrent a game so badly before, because at least that pirated version will have denuvo ripped out of it or effectively disabled.[/i][/b] Edit [May 11th 2026]: I only just recently retired my GTX 1080 in February since games are getting more demanding to run, even at 1080p- I bought Dead Space specifically because I had a "new" card which I [i]knew[/i] could run it, even with Denuvo. [b]I just learned there's a feature called "Resizable BAR" in the BIOS of modern boards, in my case it was NOT on by default[/b]. It allows the CPU to immediately read the sections of VRAM it knows it needs, rather than needing to read a bunch of memory it doesn't need before getting to what it knows it needs. [b]Make sure you enable this in your BIOS if you're playing on a modern card which supports it.[/b] It [i]greatly[/i] increased my avg fps to ~160 depending on the environment, 1080p Ultra + RTAO, however the frequent massive disorienting frame drops which is akin to your game freezing, continued to occur. THAT is Denuvo, doing what Denuvo does best. [b]In other words, Denuvo is still a nuisance and should be removed[/b], but it doesn't run at unplayable framerates anymore thanks to Resizable BAR now being enabled. I still don't recommend spending your money on this- [b]especially if you have an older system which lacks Resizable BAR[/b], it already wont run great and Denuvo will further cripple it. However, I do enjoy the game so far now that it runs well enough.

Deadspace more like Stutterspace. The stuttering is awful. Heard the game had this problem for a long time and yet EA hasn't fixed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYQFIsivzS8