Tekken 7 uses the notorious Denuvo DRM that has faced a lot of backlash among the PC gaming community due to its alleged performance penalty in games. There wasn’t really any official proof of this performance issue aside from hackers who tried to crack the game and found out some unrelated code that allegedly had an affect on the performance for the game.
The Denuvo issue escaled recently with the performance of Assassin’s Creed Origins to which Ubisoft had a response ready saying that it was not related to the DRM implementation. It took a while for hackers to crack the game and get it free from DRM but the performance remained mostly the same, hence validating the comments made by Ubisoft.
In a completely unexpected move, Tekken 7 director Katsuhiro Harada dropped this news on Twitter regarding some ‘encryption’ program affecting the performance of the game when replaying to a complaint made by fan.
Problem occurred in "TEKKEN7 for PC". that the frame rate drops when hits such as Akuma's "Shakunetsu Hadouken".
Since it's not a problem of graphics & CPU processing, it will not solve even if changing PC setting (problem with encryption program).
We'll fix Soon. Sorry Plz wait.— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) April 13, 2018
Anti-tamper 3rd party middleware. It’s live updating programs and I heard “it’s fix soon” from them. We will check it and update.
Thx
RT @TiredOcean: What does the encryption program do?— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) April 13, 2018
While this doesn’t really confirm that performance issues in games like RIME and Assassin’s Creed Origins were due to their DRM implementation, it does point towards the DRM affecting some of the game code to the extent of introducing minor performance issues with it.
Tekken 7 was already cracked after launch but it still features the Denuvo DRM. Perhaps the Tekken 7 director is pointing towards an update for the DRM implementation that might fix this issue.