GoKawiilOnimusha: Way of the Sword closes out an incredible year for Capcom, following hot on the heels of both Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata earlier in the year. Like those titles, the game is built on Capcom’s proprietary RE Engine, which has proven to be a remarkably scalable engine that can accommodate a wide range of hardware. We put some of the best CPUs for gaming through the game’s free benchmark to see how it scales on the CPU.
RE Engine is heavier on the GPU than the CPU, but still, we saw scaling across the 31 CPUs we tested, ranging from new releases like the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus , reaching back to relics of the past decade like the Ryzen 7 2700X. Largely, performance falls as you’d expect, but there were a few odd results that showed up in our testing, namely for AMD’s newer 12-core Ryzen 9 models, which struggle to keep pace in this game.
Regardless, the game runs well on a wide range of hardware. Even with the RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition we tested with the Ryzen 7 2700X, completely binding performance to the CPU, we neared 90 FPS at 1080p with Ultra settings and no ray tracing.
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This is a cursory look at Onimusha: Way of the Sword using the in-game benchmark available (we’ll go over how we tested a bit later). As usual, performance will vary from scene to scene, and we’ve yet to reach the latest areas of the game, which may have an adverse impact on performance (though we don’t expect one). We are looking at how CPUs scale in the game more so than the raw frame rate of any individual chip.
CPU scaling in Onimusha: Way of the Sword
The Onimusha: Way of the Sword benchmark is about five minutes long, primarily consisting of two in-engine cutscenes rendered in real time. The back half of the benchmark features gameplay, which shows considerably lower performance and taxes the CPU far more than the cutscenes. We chose to benchmark during the gameplay section, naturally.
We tested with the Ultra preset without ray tracing enabled. We didn’t use DLSS or FSR, either. As usual, we tested at 1080p with the RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition to isolate CPU performance as much as possible. We’ll go deeper into the specific system configuration for each platform later in this article if you’re interested. For each CPU, we ran the benchmark three times and took the median result, discarding and rerunning any outliers.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
Out of the 31 CPUs we tested, the obvious ones to call out first are AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 offerings, because they perform poorly in this game. The Ryzen 9 7900X is actually 3% slower than the Ryzen 5 7600X, and similarly, the Ryzen 9 9900X is 1% behind the Ryzen 5 9600X. There’s clearly some issue with the 12-core parts, specifically, that doesn’t show up in the single-CCD Ryzen CPUs, nor the full, 16-core, dual-CCD models.
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