Street Fighter 6

Update 6/4/23: Added configurations to play World Tour mode at 30 FPS without issues.

The ultimate fighter is back and better than ever before! Street Fighter 6, the 2D fighter, is coming back with a bang in new and exciting ways. With a roster of 18 fighters, including classics like Ryu and Chun-Li, new re-designs, and a brand new single-player experience, this won't feel like the fighters of old. Thanks to the RE Engine, the new cinematic specials and graphical style will take over, creating a game that feels fresh, yet still grounded in its roots. Rise up to the challenge and become the best fighter around!

A lot of reviews have lauded Street Fighter 6 as the best fighting package out right now, and honestly, I have to agree. This game is not only mechanically refined, but the new modes are fantastic. World Tour is a cool new single-player mode where you create an avatar, roam around an open area, and fight others to level up, get stronger, and customize your fighting style. You will encounter the main cast of Street Fighter 6 to learn and integrate their fighting styles and special moves into your arsenal.

Battle Hub is the multiplayer mode, which allows you to connect to multiple different servers and fight others in head to head combat. This is a pretty standard mode, but will be the big draw for a plethora of people, including myself, as I try to fight and win against other humans. And finally, we have the Fighting Ground, which hosts the game modes we have known to love in fighting games. These include training modes, special battle modes like "Extreme Battle", traditional online matches, and the notorious arcade mode.

Wrap all of this around with new control types, a real-time commentary feature, and the drive gauge to manage resources, and you have a fighting game where everyone can find something they love. As a game, Street Fighter 6 is amazing, but can it hold up on the Steam Deck? Well, the answer is...kind of. The one-on-one battles can run nearly perfect, but the game starts to struggle in one specific mode: World Tour.

Street Fighter 6 - Steam Deck Performance

World Tour

I want to say, I love this mode a lot, but trying to play it on the Steam Deck feels like pulling teeth. The overworld that you run around in is okay and can usually stick to around 40 - 45 FPS, but the framerate carries over into the matches too. This means you are getting around 40 - 45 FPS here, making the fights feel extremely slow and it is nowhere near ideal. This is also on the lowest settings with no TDP limits at all, so increasing framerate is not really possible.

I believe this is due to this mode having seemless transitions into fights, so it's possible the game is rendering the environment around, as well as the 2D fight area, making it harder on the system.

Because of this, I wouldn't recommend playing the World Tour mode on the Steam Deck. The fights are designed to be 60 FPS, so anything lower completely slows it down. This could change with the shader cache, but I don't believe it will do much for this mode.

World Tour mode can be played by setting the Limit World Tour Battles to 30 FPS on and you can play, but as soon as you start playing other modes and feel the fights at 60 FPS, playing on half that feels like something is missing. So while it is playable, it isn't enjoyable.

Luckily, the modes that most will be getting the game for can run near perfectly!

Battle Hub + Fighting Grounds

These two are the big attractions for Street Fighter 6 and running these at 60 FPS with solid visuals is very possible. For this, I am going to have two different builds: A quality and battery build. Usually, I would have one that focuses on framerate, but this is not a game that should ever go below 60, so we will be keeping it as close to that rate as possible.

For the quality build, I wanted to make sure the internal resolution was kept to the highest possible (5) and I feel I was able to do so while keeping as close to 60 as possible. After testing, I found that a mix of Medium, Low, and High settings to work best with some of the extra post-processing, like Depth of Field and Screen Space Reflections, turned off. This gave me a solid 60 with a TDP limit of 12, but for online play, I would take off the limit as keeping a smooth 60 is essential. This still gets the battery draining around 21W for most stages online and around 17W - 18W in Fighting Grounds.

I also made the decision to keep Anti-Aliasing on. Usually, I would turn this off to help with stability, but with Street Fighter 6, I felt the visual quality was better with it on. I generally like sharper images, but with how much hair can stand out in the game, I felt it became way too sharp. In the end, turning off AA didn't help much, but keeping it on made the game look significantly nicer. Just take a look at Blanka below to see the major differences:

Then we have a battery build. Unsurprisingly, the lowest quality preset was really the best here. I was able to use it and turn internal resolution back up to 5 and I was able to keep a TDP limit of 9, making sure battery drain didn't go over 17W in Battle Hub (and 14W - 15W in Fighting Grounds). This may seem like a lot, and for a general battery build it is, but this is a brand new game that is running at 60 FPS. Optimized or not, I would consider this a HUGE win. And with keeping internal resolution at highest, the game still looks really clear.

Between these two, the battery build will be my recommended. The extra power saved to make sure the game is a solid 60 FPS is a necessity when playing this game. It is possible the shader cache could help a bit, but we will have to see when it is out! Until then, the game is still very playable outside of World Tour.

Street Fighter 6 doesn't support 16:10 resolutions, so you will have the black bars, but it does have full controller support and cloud saves!

Conclusion

Street Fighter 6 is arguably the best fighting game that is out right now. The variety of game modes, refined combat, and gorgeous visuals are fantastic and really keep the experience one step above its competitors. The World Tour mode is a great way to enjoy a single-player experience in a fighting game while the multiple online and offline modes keep the fun going past that. Unfortunately, experiencing World Tour mode on the Steam Deck isn't the best and needs the 30 FPS limit, but every other mode works incredibly and it shocks me how well the game can run. Even without World Tour, this is a fantastic way to play and I can't wait to train for the next fight wherever I am.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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