Do Not Play Rise of the Ronin On The Steam Deck - First Look

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I was so excited to hear that Rise of the Ronin was coming to Steam, and being able to play it on PC is pretty amazing. Running around as a Ronin, slicing people up, and trying different weapon styles has been a blast. I have also been playing around with the open-world title on the Steam Deck, and I have some thoughts on performance.

We need a little more time to play the game before our full review is out, and it will be up before the game releases on the 10th, but I wanted to talk about Steam Deck performance before the game releases as soon as I could to inform everyone on how it will perform on Deck. So, consider this article more like impressions over the actual review, which will be coming within the next 2-3 days.

And before I go into detail, I also want to thank Koei Tecmo for the key to review this game.

Rise of the Ronin Steam Deck Performance So Far

So far, I am having a blast playing Rise of the Ronin, but part of the reason I am enjoying it so much is because I am not playing it on the Steam Deck. There are a couple of big issues that I found while playing, from framerate drops to frozen screens, and it ultimately stops me from recommending this on the Deck. All screenshots and testing below is done with the lowest possible settings at XeSS Performance mode.

Starting from the main menu, we can already see significant framerate drops, hitting as low as 16 FPS with our protagonist just sitting on some grass in front of us. Unfortunately, it's a sign of what's to come.

The good news is that in some scenarios, the game can hit 30 FPS. Usually, these spots are one-on-one battles in closed-off areas. However, as soon as you head out into the open world, it gets very rough. Just standing still in some spots with very little on screen gives a fluctuating 23 - 29 FPS, which can drop down to the 14 - 22 FPS range when running. The running framerate is around the same when on your horse, but there are more slowdowns and stutters.

I decided to try playing the game with the resolution reduced all the way down to 800x500 to see if that can help performance, but it unfortunately doesn't help at all. It pushes the GPU very hard and bottlenecks the CPU, so there's little to no way around this.

And please, do not use Frame Generation. It can give the illusion of having more frames, but as soon as you move, you will feel insane framerate drops, slowdowns, stutters, and small freezes. It's not only unplayable, it actually makes the already hard-to-play experience even worse.

So, I think it's safe to say that this is not a Steam Deck-compatible game. Is it a fun game to play? Absolutely. I am having a blast playing this on my PC, but outside of that, the experience is not the greatest. Even my ROG Ally X, which can hold 30 FPS most of the time, can still struggle in the open world and crowded cities with framerate drops. The game isn't the most well optimized; even the PS5 struggled to maintain 60 FPS on Performance mode, so I am not super surprised. If you have a better PC to stream from or the game goes on GeForce NOW, this will be a worthwhile experience, but I wouldn't locally download it on the Deck.

Rise of the Ronin can be pre-purchased for $49.99 ahead of its release on March 10th. Our full review of the game will be out before it is released.

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