Rise of the Ronin on PC has wrongfully brought my RTX 4090 to its knees

Rise of the Ronin, the latest PlayStation exclusive title has now released on PC, and unfortunately for PC gamers, the state the game has released in isn't fantastic.

Team Ninja's Rise of the Ronin was originally launched in March 2024 for the PlayStation 5, and while the game was met with above-average reviews for its intuitive combat system and story, the experience PC gamers are getting isn't quite as enjoyable. The PC version of the title arrived on Steam on March 11, 2025, and judging by the few reviews that have been posted to the Steam listing, many early buyers are reporting performance issues such as stuttering, low framerates, and poor graphics.

These early reviews from the public echo the same sentiment from game reviewers that published their thoughts approximately 5 days ago, with many of those reviews also citing optimization problems. I received a copy of Rise of the Ronin late last month, and I can also back up many of these claims, and throughout my testing experience, I found the majority of the problems were related to the 4K at 120FPS mode.

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When playing the game in this mode, my character and NPCs were moving in slow motion, and while my in-game FPS counter was still hovering around 60FPS, the game didn't feel or look like 60FPS. Truly a weird bug that I haven't experienced in any other title before. I informed Koei Tecmo about this problem, and my response was that an update was being launched on the release day, but the spokesperson didn't say whether the patch contained fixes. Judging by the Steam reviews, this patch didn't contain the necessary fixes.

Moreover, Rise of the Ronin is extremely demanding considering the in-game graphics, with my GeForce RTX 4090 being brought to its knees at 4K even when running DLSS, and in most cases having an unstable framerate that bounced between 40 - 60FPS.

Personally, I believe this level of performance is totally unjustified, given the graphics that are on display. Many other titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, which has better graphics, run better than this game and look better. There is also the God of War Ragnarok example, which looks stunning on PC and runs smoothly at 4K @ 60FPS with no hiccups. Simply, Rise of the Ronin is far too demanding for its graphics, which speaks to the poor optimization the game is currently facing.

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Rise of the Ronin releasing on PC just one year after the console release is a testament to game development, and the turn-around time is certainly appreciated. However, I think every PC gamer would agree that if a game is in a poorly optimized state, don't release it. I think most PC gamers are happy to wait longer for a title if it means when it comes out, it works as intended, as few things are worse in a gamers life than buying a new game you are excited about, finally getting it downloaded (150GB in this instance), and then when you start playing its totally unoptimized and is a grueling experience.