As much as we’d all like to, sometimes we just don’t have the money to own all the latest and greatest gaming equipment. So for gamers with a passion for pixels and frame rates that exceeds the capacity of their wallet, the first port of call is typically the graphics menu. You know, the menu where you turn everything off or as low as possible.
If you’re this kind of gamer, you might like to know that Street Fighter 5 is your friend. You might not have the ability to turn off every single particle effect, but you can make the game look really, really shitty if you want to.
Games don’t usually let you tank the resolution that far these days, but Capcom seems to have gone the extra mile in allowing potato PCs to run their latest fighter. It’s all thanks to two options: the resolution scale, which is where the bulk of your extra performance will come from, and the resolution itself.
Here’s a picture with the things at their highest in 1080p, with all the bells and whistles turned on.
Here’s what the game looks like when you turn the resolution scale down as much as possible, still at 1080p.
Pretty chunky. But that’s not the worst you can make it look; 640×480 was simply the lowest resolution SF5 would let my home PC run the game at. On my work computer, however, I can turn the game down even further to the exceptionally potato-friendly screen size of 320×200.
I could probably get 320×200 working on my home PC by creating a custom resolution through the NVIDIA Control Panel (the same way you create custom resolutions if you wanted to fiddle around with downsampling before tools like GeForce Experience started automating the process).
In any case, it’s nice to know that you can really turn SF5 into a visual turd if you desperately need the frames. There are plenty of gamers out there with hardware well past their prime, and it’s nice to know some new releases still let you take an angle grinder to the graphics.
Comments
11 responses to “You Can Play Street Fighter 5 In 200p If You Really Want To”
The amount of pixels in this game is to darn high!
Why are we describing computer resolutions as 200p? This was never a thing.
It’s just a consistency thing; 200p wasn’t the common terminology back when it was a widely used resolution, but it is the standard format now in a world of 1080p/1440p/4K/8K/12K etc. and so I went with that to minimise confusion.
and yet Street Fighter 2: the world warriors looks crisper and less pixilated, but i guess thats the trouble with the art style used
It’s also at a higher resolution, 320×244 interlaced.
240p is a standard format.
In the author’s case, however, they had a non-standard resolution [320×200], in which case, 200p is technically still correct. [ie: 200 vertical pixels, progressive scan]
Non-standard? 320×200 is what you got with a CGA video adaptor when in colour mode. It was one of the two video cards available for the original IBM PC, so how much more standard can you get?
I think the non-standard tag was for the description, not the resolution itself.
But wasn’t cga interlaced?
What frame rate are you getting at 200p?
My work laptop is so awful that trying to run benchmarking tools (SF5 doesn’t come with an in-built option) would be a complete and utter nightmare, so I can’t really say.
I can confirm, however, it’s not a consistent 30 fps. Doesn’t appear to drop into single digits though.