Tech Comparison: Street Fighter IV PC vs 360
While the PC version of Street Fighter IV is lagging months behind its console brethren, the core codebase for the computer version is actually much, much older. The arcade game from which the PS3 and Xbox 360 games are derived is based on PC architecture, so in essence this home game is an enhanced rendition of the "real thing". That being the case, it's equally as brilliant as the console games in terms of the raw gameplay, but the graphical assets can be scaled up to whatever your system can handle. For the Street Fighter IV purist (and we know how many of those there are), the difference could be remarkable - I mean, kit yourself out with the right equipment and you can play SFIV at 120FPS if you want. However, for the rest of us, the improvement will be marginal at best.
As it is, the arcade board on which Street Fighter IV was designed is somewhat underpowered by enthusiast standards. Designed to be cheap to build and even cheaper to fix should something go wrong, the spec is exceptionally modest - a 2.13GHz Intel Core2Duo CPU powers the show while a 256MB GeForce 7900GS provides the visuals, which are rendered at 720p at 60 frames per second.
This gives you some idea of the base spec that'll give you arcade-perfect gameplay. Capcom reckons you'll get something playable on a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 with a GeForce 6600 GPU (yeah, good luck with that), but what is interesting is that its maximum recommended spec remains light - a 2.0GHz Core2Duo with an 8600GT. That said, there are a range of additional graphical options and post-processing features built into the game and amusingly, should you ramp absolutely everything up to the limits and run at 1080p, the built-in benchmark program still manages to rate my Core i7 set-up with top-of-the-line GTX295 as merely "efficient", with a B rating. However, as you'll see later, while the options can impose exponentially larger loads on the GPU, the actual visual results shows only minor improvements over the console game.
Multiplayer support is in there too, based on Games for Windows Live. Online performance is essentially a match for the Xbox 360 version from what I can tell, and the GfWL interface also means that there's another 1,000 gamerscore to glean. The Achievements appear to parallel exactly what's on the 360 version. Which effectively sums up the entirety of what we have here - everything that was in the 360 game with a bit of bonus graphical glitz. This is no crappy port, it's the best fighting game you can buy on PC.
And so, if this were a review, we would come to the final score. I can't help but feel that the original 10/10 was somewhat generous. There's no doubt that for me, this is the best one-on-one fighter of this generation, and the game is much more fun to play than Virtua Fighter 5 and Soul Calibur IV, but the fact is that those titles are literally the only worthwhile competition on the market, and both are really just graphical upgrades of PS2-era games.
Street Fighter IV is orders of magnitude more appealing than both of them, but underneath the graphical facelift, it's essentially just a smoother, more refined version of what we've played before. As it is, I'm still waiting for the next-gen gameplay to match the visuals. Every attack is a pre-baked animation - there's no smooth, flowing movement from technique to technique, and thus no real customisation in how you can fight. Strategy in these games is a case of matching predefined techniques and combos against another. Surely, 17 years after the debut of Street Fighter II, Capcom can do better than that?
The 3D visuals are superb, but they're still bound by the limitations of the hand-drawn sprites that made up the first one-on-one fighting game created decades ago. We have 3D characters here and developers should be able to simulate proper movement of the human body. From that base, developers should be able to make a game that matches the raw exhilaration of the best martial arts movies. It's an obvious evolution of the fighting game, but nobody's doing it.
For Comparison Video: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/street-fighter-iv-tech-comparison
While the PC version of Street Fighter IV is lagging months behind its console brethren, the core codebase for the computer version is actually much, much older. The arcade game from which the PS3 and Xbox 360 games are derived is based on PC architecture, so in essence this home game is an enhanced rendition of the "real thing". That being the case, it's equally as brilliant as the console games in terms of the raw gameplay, but the graphical assets can be scaled up to whatever your system can handle. For the Street Fighter IV purist (and we know how many of those there are), the difference could be remarkable - I mean, kit yourself out with the right equipment and you can play SFIV at 120FPS if you want. However, for the rest of us, the improvement will be marginal at best.
As it is, the arcade board on which Street Fighter IV was designed is somewhat underpowered by enthusiast standards. Designed to be cheap to build and even cheaper to fix should something go wrong, the spec is exceptionally modest - a 2.13GHz Intel Core2Duo CPU powers the show while a 256MB GeForce 7900GS provides the visuals, which are rendered at 720p at 60 frames per second.
This gives you some idea of the base spec that'll give you arcade-perfect gameplay. Capcom reckons you'll get something playable on a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 with a GeForce 6600 GPU (yeah, good luck with that), but what is interesting is that its maximum recommended spec remains light - a 2.0GHz Core2Duo with an 8600GT. That said, there are a range of additional graphical options and post-processing features built into the game and amusingly, should you ramp absolutely everything up to the limits and run at 1080p, the built-in benchmark program still manages to rate my Core i7 set-up with top-of-the-line GTX295 as merely "efficient", with a B rating. However, as you'll see later, while the options can impose exponentially larger loads on the GPU, the actual visual results shows only minor improvements over the console game.
Multiplayer support is in there too, based on Games for Windows Live. Online performance is essentially a match for the Xbox 360 version from what I can tell, and the GfWL interface also means that there's another 1,000 gamerscore to glean. The Achievements appear to parallel exactly what's on the 360 version. Which effectively sums up the entirety of what we have here - everything that was in the 360 game with a bit of bonus graphical glitz. This is no crappy port, it's the best fighting game you can buy on PC.
And so, if this were a review, we would come to the final score. I can't help but feel that the original 10/10 was somewhat generous. There's no doubt that for me, this is the best one-on-one fighter of this generation, and the game is much more fun to play than Virtua Fighter 5 and Soul Calibur IV, but the fact is that those titles are literally the only worthwhile competition on the market, and both are really just graphical upgrades of PS2-era games.
Street Fighter IV is orders of magnitude more appealing than both of them, but underneath the graphical facelift, it's essentially just a smoother, more refined version of what we've played before. As it is, I'm still waiting for the next-gen gameplay to match the visuals. Every attack is a pre-baked animation - there's no smooth, flowing movement from technique to technique, and thus no real customisation in how you can fight. Strategy in these games is a case of matching predefined techniques and combos against another. Surely, 17 years after the debut of Street Fighter II, Capcom can do better than that?
The 3D visuals are superb, but they're still bound by the limitations of the hand-drawn sprites that made up the first one-on-one fighting game created decades ago. We have 3D characters here and developers should be able to simulate proper movement of the human body. From that base, developers should be able to make a game that matches the raw exhilaration of the best martial arts movies. It's an obvious evolution of the fighting game, but nobody's doing it.
For Comparison Video: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/street-fighter-iv-tech-comparison
