Act 3’s issues aren’t GPU bound, it’s entirely CPU bottlenecked. It’s likely someone with a slower GPU won’t see as big a drop in performance in act 3 as you, and it’s likely you don’t see any performance gain from using DLSS in act 3. My 2080 Super was sleeping through it even at 3440x1440 on ultra while my Ryzen 7 3700x was getting thrashed.
You’re wrong. Denuvo isn’t removed from cracked games, just circumvented. When you play a cracked Dwnuvo game, Denuvo is still running while being tricked into thinking the game is legit. Besides this, we’ve seen time and time again already that Denuvo in fact doesn’t have an impact on performance, both in games that have had executables without it leaked and had it removed later on as it’s intended to be. At worst it increases the initial startup time of a game, but doesn’t affect your framerate once the game is up and running.
What does impact performance, however, is in-house anti-tamper/DRM bullshit and other insane practices that’s often implemented alongside Denuvo. Capcom is especially a bad offender here. To make a somewhat recent example, you know what made Resident Evil 8 run so badly? Among others, checking the list of available resolutions on every. Single. Frame. This and other dumb crap implemented by Capcom themselves was disabled in the cracked version and by using reframework, hence the cracked games runs better.
Everybody loves to circlejerk about how bad Denuvo is, but the reality is that it’s become a scapegoat taking attention away from the real issues with games.
When you buy digital media, whether physical or digital, you are buying a license to be able to view it whenever you want. You do not own the media. You don’t own the rights to that game just because you have a physical copy of it, you don’t have access to the source code, and it is still riddled with DRM. The same applies to movies and music as well.
At the end of the day, whether a piece of media is stored on a Blu-ray/DVD or an HDD/SSD makes little difference. If all ownership means to you is being able to access the media you’ve purchased a license to consume regardless of its online status, then archive it. Your SSD or HDD is as much a physical media as a Blu-ray disk.