Onimusha: Way of the Sword's Benchmark Tool Shows Promising Steam Deck Performance

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Onimusha: Way of the Sword is one of the games. I am most looking forward to September. The next game in the series stunned me, with its beautiful world, incredible combat, and some great mechanics that kept me invested throughout. I’m so excited to see more of the game, and with its release in two months, I know the wait will be worth it. And to get us ready for it, a new benchmark tool was released, and I just had to see what it would show for the Steam Deck.

The benchmark defaults to the lowest settings and starts us off in a cutscene, which has a variety of scenes in it (like close-ups of characters' faces and tons of other people). Then, we get into combat scenarios, where Musashi is striking down enemies, then running around the city to fight more. This culminates in a large attack and the start of a boss fight.

At the default lowest settings, there are some visual compromises that I noticed. Details on characters weren’t as clear; there were shadows that popped in when running around the city, and there were definitely some areas that looked like they had been hit a little too hard by upscaling, but the overall image looked decent. I was generally surprised by how well it was running throughout the benchmark at that visual quality. However, the game is using the same RE engine that has shown how greatly optimized it can be for the Deck. I shouldn’t be too surprised, but I am.

For the most part, the performance held up quite well. Cutscenes were stuck above 40 FPS, even when there was a good chunk happening on the screen, and combat with multiple enemies stayed above 30 FPS. The only time I saw a dramatic drop below 30 was right before the boss fight, where Musashi used the giant attack with a spear that brought tons of flames and effects on a larger scale. However, as soon as he started fighting the boss, the framerate went back up to 30.

I also tested the benchmark on the Low preset, which does show some nice improvements to visual quality, though we still have the shadow pop-in. However, there were way more drops below 30 in combat, while cut scenes stuck around 30-40 more often. Based on the benchmark, it doesn’t seem like the low preset will be worth using, especially later on in the game as we get new weapons with large attacks and fight more enemies at once.

And just to see if anything would change, I decided to test out the benchmark on the lowest preset on the SteamOS 3.8.22 Beta. This beta version comes with a slightly more updated graphics driver that has some improvements for ray tracing performance. I wanted to see if there would be any difference in the benchmark score or framerate with the beta.

However, performance was around the same. The scores were almost identical, with some minor changes in the framerates and 1% lows during both cutscenes and fighting sequences. So, I don’t see much changing from the new Mesa driver.

Based on the benchmark, it looks like we should have no problem with Onimusha: Way of the Sword on the Steam Deck, as long as we are playing on the lowest graphical preset. There are some obvious visual compromises, like the character model quality and shadows, but the performance should at least stick above 30 FPS with those settings.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword can be pre-purchased for $69.99 ahead of its September 4th release date.

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