Ninja Gaiden 4is finally available and, considering that some have had trouble with the PC version of Ninja Gaiden II Black, it’s only natural to be a bit wary of the game’s PC performance. I was personally quite worried about the game’s install size, as Steam listed it as weighing in at a whopping 100 gigabytes. Thankfully, this was a fairly major overestimation and the game only requires about 55 gigabytes on PC. This is also a far cry from the grievously oversized 81 gigabytes that Ninja Gaiden II Black demands. To kick things off, let’s take a look at the game’s minimum and recommended specs.
As you can see, these are far from demanding specs, meaning that anyone with a slightly modern GPU shouldn’t have much trouble running the game with power to spare. I played through the entire game with a 3090 Founder’s Edition and a 5700x CPU and found the game to mostly run wonderfully at max settings. For the most part, the game tended to give me a minimum of 90 fps, but it definitely went up considerably higher within smaller areas with fewer enemies around. As far as optimization goes, Ninja Gaiden 4 is pretty terrific, which is likely partially due to Platinum Games using its proprietary engine instead of Unreal tech. Let’s look at what you can expect in terms of general settings.
We have a choice between some very standard modern options here. You can pick borderless widescreen, windowed, or fullscreen. These all update in real-time, so no need to press apply to see if they work. The game does indeed have HDR, so you can turn that on if you’re on a supported monitor or video mode. If you’re planning on running with your framerate uncapped, you sadly won’t be quite able to do that here. The good news is that the limit goes up to 240, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to hit that, even with a better graphics card than mine. Vertical sync also doesn’t alter your framerate, so you can turn it on here without worry.
As for upscaling, FSR and DLSS are both available, but if you’re hoping for XeSS or any sort of framegen (which Ninja Gaiden II Black had), you’re unfortunately out of luck. Thankfully, due to how well the game runs and how minimal its required specs are, you probably won’t need to bother with that. This is also a game that might be hurt by using framegen in general, as it’s incredibly timing-focused and introducing framegen’s additional input lag in exchange for smoothness can very possibly get you into some serious trouble. Let’s look at the more specific graphics features.
For anti-aliasing, you’ve only got a choice between TAA and DLAA. Of course, if you’d rather just supersample your way through things, setting the game to a higher resolution than your monitor while in borderless will work fine. Considering the extra GPU headroom, that won’t even eat as many frames as most AAA games will. The rest of the options are fairly standard, including optional dynamic resolution and motion blur. Considering the game’s publisher and its status, these options aren’t all that in-depth, but the game isn’t exactly a technically powerhouse. Finally, let’s look at the keyboard and mouse settings.
If you’re a masochist, yes, you can play Ninja Gaiden 4 fully with your mouse and keyboard. Additionally, both gamepad and mouse and keyboard inputs are completely remappable, although it doesn’t look like you can change your default menu buttons (escape lets you into the game start screen, backspace lets you out of menus). In terms of controller support, the game doesn’t support Nintendo Switch Pro controllers out of the box, but they’ll work with DS4Windows enabled if you’re playing the Xbox App version.
All-in-all, Ninja Gaiden 4 has a pretty terrific PC version that’s well-optimized with a respectable amount of options. It seems the game will be highly playable across a wide spectrum of GPUs, so Platinum has done a great job here that’s easily the best PC version a game in the series has received.
Ninja Gaiden 4 is finally available and, considering that some have had trouble with the PC version of Ninja Gaiden II Black, it’s only natural to be a bit wary of the game’s PC performance. I was personally quite worried…
Ninja Gaiden 4is finally available and, considering that some have had trouble with the PC version of Ninja Gaiden II Black, it’s only natural to be a bit wary of the game’s PC performance. I was personally quite worried about the game’s install size, as Steam listed it as weighing in at a whopping 100 gigabytes. Thankfully, this was a fairly major overestimation and the game only requires about 55 gigabytes on PC. This is also a far cry from the grievously oversized 81 gigabytes that Ninja Gaiden II Black demands. To kick things off, let’s take a look at the game’s minimum and recommended specs.
As you can see, these are far from demanding specs, meaning that anyone with a slightly modern GPU shouldn’t have much trouble running the game with power to spare. I played through the entire game with a 3090 Founder’s Edition and a 5700x CPU and found the game to mostly run wonderfully at max settings. For the most part, the game tended to give me a minimum of 90 fps, but it definitely went up considerably higher within smaller areas with fewer enemies around. As far as optimization goes, Ninja Gaiden 4 is pretty terrific, which is likely partially due to Platinum Games using its proprietary engine instead of Unreal tech. Let’s look at what you can expect in terms of general settings.
We have a choice between some very standard modern options here. You can pick borderless widescreen, windowed, or fullscreen. These all update in real-time, so no need to press apply to see if they work. The game does indeed have HDR, so you can turn that on if you’re on a supported monitor or video mode. If you’re planning on running with your framerate uncapped, you sadly won’t be quite able to do that here. The good news is that the limit goes up to 240, and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to hit that, even with a better graphics card than mine. Vertical sync also doesn’t alter your framerate, so you can turn it on here without worry.
As for upscaling, FSR and DLSS are both available, but if you’re hoping for XeSS or any sort of framegen (which Ninja Gaiden II Black had), you’re unfortunately out of luck. Thankfully, due to how well the game runs and how minimal its required specs are, you probably won’t need to bother with that. This is also a game that might be hurt by using framegen in general, as it’s incredibly timing-focused and introducing framegen’s additional input lag in exchange for smoothness can very possibly get you into some serious trouble. Let’s look at the more specific graphics features.
For anti-aliasing, you’ve only got a choice between TAA and DLAA. Of course, if you’d rather just supersample your way through things, setting the game to a higher resolution than your monitor while in borderless will work fine. Considering the extra GPU headroom, that won’t even eat as many frames as most AAA games will. The rest of the options are fairly standard, including optional dynamic resolution and motion blur. Considering the game’s publisher and its status, these options aren’t all that in-depth, but the game isn’t exactly a technically powerhouse. Finally, let’s look at the keyboard and mouse settings.
If you’re a masochist, yes, you can play Ninja Gaiden 4 fully with your mouse and keyboard. Additionally, both gamepad and mouse and keyboard inputs are completely remappable, although it doesn’t look like you can change your default menu buttons (escape lets you into the game start screen, backspace lets you out of menus). In terms of controller support, the game doesn’t support Nintendo Switch Pro controllers out of the box, but they’ll work with DS4Windows enabled if you’re playing the Xbox App version.
All-in-all, Ninja Gaiden 4 has a pretty terrific PC version that’s well-optimized with a respectable amount of options. It seems the game will be highly playable across a wide spectrum of GPUs, so Platinum has done a great job here that’s easily the best PC version a game in the series has received.
by Andrew Farrell
