Take it from someone who has worked on an AAA-title... DRM Does impact performance, especially if you are low on RAM.

The game I worked on increased memory consumption by 2.3 when we applied Securom to the exe.
It's not a problem if you have the RAM, but if you don't then it will affect you negatively since you need to swap.

I'm talking about The Witcher 2 specifically. The Witcher 2 for Steam does not have any other DRM. Chris, the guy who deals with putting games on to the Steam system said that Steam version has no DRM. I know other games have 3rd party DRM, but with The Witcher 2 it does not.

Sorry if it has been postet before: http://forum.notebookreview.com/gaming-software-graphics-cards/580627-witcher-2-performance-issues-solved.html

There is even a video showing the difference. Some german gaming websites already made news entries about the performance difference (link: http://www.gamestar.de/spiele/the-witcher-2-assassins-of-kings/news/the_witcher_2_assassins_of_kings,44750,2323094.html) confirming it.

I think it's getting time CDPR responded to this, they have a lot to explain!

@GODzillaGSPB
Thanks for the heads up on that issue.

@cdarbagallo
Of course DRM is the responsibility of the publisher. Because of them CDRP were forced to implement it in their game. And yet it is the responsibility of CDRP to do - technically - something about that.

What if they can't, contractually?

I have a quad core CPU and 8gb of memory. The retail version takes about 15-20 seconds to load up. If it were much longer then I'd replace the exe. DRM should be removed anyway, people pirate the game regardless, so it's just pissing off the real customers

@cdarbagallo
That, dear sir, is a good question! And I don't have a answer to it.
(I really don't know the mechanics behind such things ...)

But its obvious that the retail version of the game has a technical flaw because of the drm-implementation and CDRP should find a way (with the publisher if you will) to solve this issue.

Question: Who's the publisher of the polish version? I think it's CD Project Red. And the polish version has Seucrom, too. ;)

@GODzillaGSPB
Not CDPR, just CD Projekt ... ;)

In my opinion this is totally unacceptable. I have D2D (UK) version and the initial load time is really long. That points I propably have big fps reduction as well because of SecuROM.

Really huge punishment for buying the game legally instead of pirating.

Reason I bought D2D version is because my moral didn't give in changing country in GoG to get W2 in decent price.

Oh sorry, my mistake then. But I guess it's still the same...company, right? Either way, its in the game exe so I figure the developer has to make a fix.

This SecuROM implementation could be a rather effective (though somewhat underhand) way of pushing those who've purchased a physical copy into paying a second time for the less troublesome GOG version.

On the other hand, there is a thread asking for a DRM-Free addon so maybe more people posting there would encourage CDP to provide a cheaper option?

Not sure.
If there truly is an issue with the DRM slowing the game down, given CDRP's past excellent support, I am sure that it will get either removed altogether (once some time has passed) or the reason for the slow down patched.

Depends, dual cores see big differences, but quad core shows little difference, less then 10fps added for Quadcore, 6+cores apparently shows no difference at all.