KOEI Tecmo has lifted the review embargo for the PC version of Rise of the Ronin. Powered by the Katana Engine, it’s time now to benchmark it and examine its performance on the PC.
For our benchmarks, 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 572.65, and the Radeon Adrenalin Edition 25.2.1 drivers.
Team Ninja has added a lot of graphics settings to tweak. PC gamers can adjust the quality of Shadows, Textures, Models, Effects and more. The game also supports NVIDIA DLSS 3, AMD FSR 3.0 and Intel XeSS. Plus, there are options for Chromatic Aberration, Vignetting, Film Grain and more.
Before continuing, I should mention an odd behavior I’ve encountered on my QLED monitor. Rise of the Ronin is a game that has MAJOR flickering issues on OLED/QLED monitors. For whatever reason, when navigating the in-game settings, I was having flickers whenever I was selecting a setting. I was also having major in-game flickers, though most of them were fixed by a day-0 update. Not only that, but you cannot use DLSS 3 Frame Generation in Fullscreen Mode. Instead, you’ll have to use Window or Borderless. I raised this issue to Team Ninja and its response was “The unavailability of frame generation in non-borderless fullscreen mode is a specification”. That’s the first time I’ve heard anything like that. But hey, it is what it is.
Rise of the Ronin is a GPU-bound title. Without its day-0 patch, the game ran horribly, even on an NVIDIA RTX 5090. I kid you not. We’re talking about 40FPS at Native 4K/Ultra without Ray Tracing. Thankfully, things greatly improved, but you’ll still need a really powerful GPU to run it on Ultra Settings.
At 1080p/Ultra/No Ray Tracing, you’ll at least need an NVIDIA RTX 3080. From what I could see, this game favors NVIDIA’s hardware. The NVIDIA RTX 3080 is slightly faster than the AMD Radeon RX 6900XT. As for the NVIDIA RTX 5080, it is 20-23% faster than the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX.
At 1440p/Ultra/No Ray Tracing, you’ll need at least an AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX for gaming with 60FPS at all times. As for Native 4K/Ultra/No RT, the only GPU that can run the game smoothly is the NVIDIA RTX 5090. Believe it or not, in this rasterized game, the NVIDIA RTX 4090 is unable to provide a smooth gaming experience. This is nuts.
Now the good news here is that the game can scale well via its in-game graphics settings. By dropping the settings to High, we were able to raise our minimum framerate to 80FPS on the NVIDIA RTX 5090. It was also possible to get a 60FPS experience on the NVIDIA RTX 4090. So yes, on High or Standard settings, the game can run smoothly on a wide range of GPUs. In other words, consider the Ultra settings as unoptimized as they can get.
The reason I describe the Ultra Settings as “unoptimized” is because the game’s visuals do not justify its enormous GPU requirements. Textures look mediocre even on Ultra settings. The lighting feels old-gen-ish, and it’s nowhere close to what you’d expect from a current-gen game. Plus, there are major shadow cascade issues as shadows will form right in front of you. Not only that, but there are some weird issues with some shadows.
Take a look at this video. The ground shadows are “square-ish”, lack detail, and they move with one-two frames at random times. That’s not how dynamic shadows should behave. At 0:32, I go to a place in which the shadows work as intended. You can clearly see their smooth movement and how more refined they are. Then, I go back to the bugged shadows. This is definitely a bug and not how the shadows in the game should look or move. I’ve informed Team Ninja about this issue, and the team has promised to fix it via the game’s day-1 patch.
In all honesty, you should avoid the Ultra settings even if you own a powerful GPU. However, if you still want to use them, you’ll have to enable an upscaler. On the NVIDIA RTX 5090, the best way to play the game is at 4K/Ultra with NVIDIA DLAA and Frame Gen. This combo will let you run it with over 100FPS at all times. Thanks to DLAA, the image quality is the best you can get right now. And, since the base framerate is quite high, you won’t notice any input latency issues with Frame Gen.
For those wondering, Team Ninja has used Ray Tracing to enhance the game’s reflections. These ray-traced reflections can be a bit underwhelming. To be honest, this is my least favourite RT effect. It would make more sense to have ray-traced shadows, RTGI or RTAO. Those would bring a better visual improvement than RT Reflections.
In terms of stutters, I did not experience any major traversal stutters. Plus, the game does not have any shader compilation stutters. Moreover, the KB&M controls are great. This is something that worried me after playing Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. Thankfully, mouse camera movement is properly implemented in Rise of the Ronin.
All in all, Rise of the Ronin can run great on various PC systems, provided you use its High or Standard settings. The game’s Ultra settings are as unoptimized as they can get, and you should avoid them. The game SHOULD run better for the visuals it displays on screen. To put things into perspective, it looks and runs worse than Ghost of Tsushima. So, this feels like a mixed bag. It’s not a total mess, but it’s also not a game that will “wow” you with its optimization!
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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