Dynasty Warriors 9 has just been released on the PC and, unfortunately, the game suffers from performance issues. I’m guessing that most of you will say <<Well, this does not surprise us. It’s KOEI Tecmo>> however we were hoping for something better, especially after witnessing the publisher fixing the PC version of Nioh.
Let’s start with the opening tutorial stage. This stage under-performed on both our AMD and NVIDIA test machine (Intel i7 4930K (overclocked at 4.2Ghz) with 8GB RAM, AMD’s Radeon RX580, NVIDIA’s GTX980Ti, Windows 10 64-bit and the latest version of the GeForce and Catalyst drivers). Both of our graphics cards were not being used to their fullest, resulting in a really mediocre experience. The AMD Radeon RX580 was running the tutorial with around 30-35fps on Max settings at 1080p whereas the NVIDIA GTX980Ti was running it with 45fps. Since this is happening on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware, we are certain that this isn’t a driver issue. It’s also worth noting that the game uses DX11 instead of DX12.
Things got better once we started playing the game as our GTX980Ti was able to offer 60fps (with some minor drops to 57fps). Still, the game does not look THAT good in order to push a GTX980Ti to its limits. For reference, Kingdom Come: Deliverance – another open-world title we’ve been testing these days – performs and looks way better than this latest Dynasty Warriors game. Things are even worse for AMD users as our AMD Radeon RX580 was unable to offer a smooth 60fps experience on both High and Medium settings. In order to reach 60fps, we had to lower our settings to Low. And, to be honest, we wouldn’t be complaining about this, however, we feel that the visuals that are being displayed here are simply not worth the performance hit. Seriously, just look at the following screenshot and tell me why it performs like that. Not only that, but other open-world games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, The Division and Assassin’s Creed Origins perform similarly or a bit better and look way, way better than Dynasty Warriors 9. Hell, even Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain looks better than Dynasty Warriors 9.
And then there is the mouse look. While Team Ninja has managed to offer amazing mouse raw input support in Nioh, Dynasty Warriors 9 suffers from jerkish mouse movement. It feels more like the mouse emulating the left stick of a controller than offering a proper mouse look, resulting in awkward movement even when the game runs at 60fps.
KOEI Tecmo does not also allow PC gamers to change their graphics settings while playing. In order to change your settings, you’ll have to quit the game and go back to the main menu. Each and every time you want to adjust something. Oh, and as with pretty much all KOEI Tecmo games, Dynasty Warriors 9 does not display proper on-screen keyboard indicators.
We’ll have more about Dynasty Warriors 9 when our PC Performance Analysis goes live later this week, however, things – tech wise – are not looking good at all for this new Dynasty Warriors game!
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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You know what bugs me… Why the heck is the game priced at 63 euros… while also being 10% off? This is more expensive than your first day release “AAA” game.
Is this thing just for Romania? Not that I’m buying this garbage, but I’m genuinely curious.
funny that its 22 $ in ksa store
must be romania. Its 20 usd here.
Oh wait, I was looking at the bundle… My bad.
It’s 25 euros… Still quite more expensive since euros value 30% more than dollars. And the economy here is $hit…
Well your neighbor here I’m from Serbia here the price on steam is 69,99€ and discounted to 62,99€ our economy here is worse then yours and at least you guys can go somewhere else in eu to work we cant. So I use a trick, used vpn and changed my country to usa this way at least the prices are instead 1€ changed to 1$ but still I would be happy to be in your position and get your prices. Maybe 2050. when Serbia joins eu I will be in a better situation like you are now(if eu doesn’t split up till then).
Damn, it really sucks man. Just goes to show that somebody thinks they have it bad, there’s somebody out there who has it worse…
Eastern Europe is pretty shafted regardless. Though, I never considered using a VPN. Might as well save some money myself.
Most games in my country(Philippines) are cheaper compared to other countries.
Can we swap countries? :3
I would gift you but even then Steam blocked that rofl.
I used to gift my friends from Vietnam and SG.
KT are known for charging over the top with their multiplat titles. PW3 on Steam upon release ended up around £55, which was insane for a multiplat console port price. Especially considering it had content cut from it and looked/ran poorly compared to the PS4 version.
The question is whether this is also what happens on console, where it also has performance issues. I wouldn’t expect the game to be better on PC than on console, at least not for the average user.
its the same on console
It performs really badly on the normal PS4 as well so it’s just a badly optimized game.
The one thing you didn’t test was CPU optimization. If it’s heavily multi-threaded (a long shot I know), a Ryzen CPU would make a difference.
With it being open world and having so many AI on screen, this could certainly be the problem, especially as it runs like junk on both GPUs. Did turning down the settings have any impact? If not, this also points towards a CPU issue.
Poor performance can also be partly blamed because of KOEI Tecmo’s proprietary in-house Game ENGINE, they have been using in their studios.
Wait, what? The game isn’t out? Just like that? No fan fare, no nothing?
The game by itself is a train wreck. The change to open world was done poorly by them.
Koei Tecmo should start hire some competent PC port dev starting from now…
KT, surprise, surprise.
KT loves to churn out downgraded and console parity ports, all at full price if not higher when it comes to PC.
This is why I don’t bother supporting them, because they fail to support what I’d expect of a PC port job, let alone the price.
Not a surprise at all.
Everything they have produced on PC has been utter garbage.
Well,let’s not buy this crappy performing,sh**ty looking game. it’s a waste of time for a pc gamer.
Gamepad on Xbox One NOT working on Pc version, anyone have the same issue??
I heard on consoles it also suffer from horrid framedrops under 30fps
Actually it does not matter if game is written only for consoles, for PC and consoles or only for PC, if code is a mess then don’t expect that game will work good. Red Dead Redemption was console exclusive and worked really bad due to messy code but Rockstar was too lazy to improve it. Duke Nukem Forever also had a messy code but it was later patched on PC version (therefore PC has advantage over consoles, you can write patch yourself if you know something about programming). Also Koei Tecmo is known from poor quality PC ports but this time is quite opposite, I mean PC version works bit better than console versions.
But anyway game is not worth to buy on PC version. I think PC gamers should put pressure down on Koei Tecmo. Other Japanese developers somehow learned how to optimize their games on PC and now they work really good, sometimes even better than on consoles.