KOEI Tecmo shadow-dropped Ninja Gaiden 2 Black on PC last week. Team Ninja has basically remastered this classic Ninja Gaiden game in Unreal Engine 5, using new and more detailed assets. Thus, it’s time to benchmark this remaster and examine its performance on the PC.

For this PC Performance Analysis, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, AMD’s Radeon RX 6900XT, RX 7900XTX, as well as NVIDIA’s RTX 2080Ti, RTX 3080, RTX 4090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, the GeForce 572.16, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.1.1 drivers. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

Team Ninja has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Shadows, Effects, Global Illumination, Reflections, Foliage and more. The game also supports AMD FSR 3.1, NVIDIA DLSS 3 and Intel XeSS. Plus, there are settings for Ray Tracing, Chromatic Aberration, Motion Blur and more.

Ninja Gaiden 2 Black does not have any built-in benchmark. And, sadly, its in-engine cut-scenes, which appeared to be quite demanding, are locked at 60FPS. Thus, we’ve used the opening area for our benchmarks.

Let’s start with Ray Tracing. Below you can find two comparison screenshots. And, honestly, at first glance, I can’t really tell the difference. There are some slight changes to AO and GI, but they are not that noticeable. These RT effects also come with a 10-17% performance hit. My guess is that this option enables Hardware Lumen. This is why AO and GI look a bit sharper and more detailed with it enabled.

Ninja Gaiden 2 Black does not require a high-end CPU and can be easily described as a GPU-bound title. Almost all of our GPUs were able to provide a smooth gaming experience at 1080p/Max Settings/No RT. Even the RTX2080Ti was able to push an average of 70FPS (though it did drop below 60FPS at times).

At 1440p/Max Settings/No RT, the NVIDIA RTX 3080 and the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT were able to provide a smooth gaming experience, provided you have a FreeSync/G-Sync monitor. As for Native 4K/Max Settings, NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 had no trouble at all running it with over 60FPS. As for the NVIDIA RTX 5080, it was also able to run it smoothly (although there were some minor drops below 60FPS).

Graphics-wise, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black looks significantly better than its original version. Team Ninja has updated pretty much all of the game’s textures and assets. It also replaced its dated lighting system and used new effects. This is one of the best remasters we’ve seen to date. All cut-scenes and environments have the same layout but with better graphics. This is what all remasters of older titles in new game engines should be like.

Before closing, I do have to mention the disappointing KB&M controls. Now I know this game was built for controllers. However, the menu navigation is currently awful with the mouse. Ironically, during gameplay, KB&M is actually functional. The only downside when using KB&M is the weird camera “warp-in” issues. For some reason, the camera warps in when Hayabusa moves or runs, making the camera movement feel stuttery.

All in all, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black performs well on PC. The game looks significantly better than its original version, and you won’t need a powerful PC for gaming at 1080p. GPU requirements go way up at 4K. This is most likely due to Lumen. So yeah, at that res, you’ll need a top-of-the-line GPU. If you don’t have one, you’ll simply have to reduce the in-game graphics. That, or you can enable DLSS/FSR to gain some performance back.

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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