Rise of the Ronin Should Not Be Rated Steam Deck Playable

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Finding large-scale open-world titles to play on the Steam Deck is never easy. Yes, we do have some older ones, like Skyrim and The Witcher 3, that run exceptionally well, but there aren’t many others when considering newer titles. Rise of the Ronin was one such game. When it came to PC last year, I was extremely excited. However, there was no way it was a good game to enjoy on the Deck. That leads me to my big surprise when I discovered the game actually received the Playable badge last week, so I had to test it for myself.

The game itself is very fun, and comes from the team behind Nioh and Ninja Gaiden. It takes place in 19th century Japan, and we can end up using a combination of swords and guns to strike down our enemies. But if you were trying to play this on the Steam Deck, you would have been met with constant drops below 30 FPS on the lowest settings, which did not look good. There’s no way I would’ve considered it Playable, which is why it shocked me so much that it received the Playable badge. I even looked back at its update history to see if anything had recently been changed that could’ve improved performance, but I found nothing.

The reason the game was rated Playable is due to small in-game text and the need to manually change the graphical settings for it to perform well. This makes sense because it defaults to pretty high settings. But even at the lowest settings, I would not consider it a good experience on the Deck.

So, when I booted up Rise of the Ronin, I wasn’t expecting any changes in performance, and I was right on the money. On the lowest possible settings with dynamic resolution aiming for 60 FPS, FSR 3 upscaling on Performance, and prioritizing FPS, I was still getting lots of drops and stuttering. There are definitely moments where the game can stick to 30 FPS, primarily in combat, but running around the world, exploring, and watching cutscenes show massive drops.

When looking at the system usage, it makes sense. Both the CPU and GPU are being pushed to the limit, with both of them having over 90% usage. Coupled with the high RAM usage, there’s only so much power that can go around, so we are left with FPS drops below 30 and stuttering. And with this being on the lowest possible settings, the game itself doesn’t look great at all.

I also decided to try lossless scaling frame generation and MAKO to see if there’s any improvement, and while we can make the game appear smoother, there are still loads of stuttering that don’t make it possible to play. It’s the worst when you’re running through the world and trying to turn the camera, but if you look closely, you can also see ghosting and bubbling around models. So, there’s not much we can do to improve it and make it playable.

At the end of the day, this is another game where the Steam Deck badge is misleading. The game suffers tremendously at the lowest possible settings, with constant drops below 30 and stuttering as the device’s limited resources are being pulled in every which way. I would’ve loved to be able to play this on the Deck, but it’s nowhere near enjoyable, and I would never recommend it to anyone who seriously wants to actually enjoy the game.

Rise of the Ronin is $49.99 on Steam.

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