Yesterday, with only three days left before the game's official release date, CAPCOM published the Street Fighter 6 benchmark tool on its official website.

　　It's an opportunity for anyone interested in the upcoming fighting game to check how it will run on their configuration before committing to a purchase. Time to take it for a spin, then.

　　The Street Fighter 6 benchmark download weighs around 15.5GB. Once you've installed it on your PC and launched the tool, you get the chance to tweak its graphics settings before starting the test run. Firstly, though, you'll be asked whether you want to enable 'shader warming on startup'.

　　This is the game's equivalent of shader cache, which so many game developers have decided to include in their PC games after a few releases (chiefly The Callisto Protocol) spectacularly failed to do so. You should definitely set this on unless you're fine with getting random shader stutters during your first few matches.

　　Other than that, Street Fighter 6 splits in graphics settings into Basic and Detailed. Basic settings include Fighting Ground Background Object Density, Internal Resolution, Display Mode, Maximum Frame Rate, Ambient Occlusion, Screen Space Reflections, Motion Blur, VSync, NPCs, Battle Hub Participants, Subsurface Scattering, Antialiasing, and Depth of Field.

　　The Internal Resolution is a bit weird in that it goes from 1 to 5 instead of sliding on a 100 scale, like in most games. Unfortunately, it can't be pushed to higher than native resolution, which is a pity since the game also doesn't pick up higher resolutions set through NVIDIA's Control Panel through DSR/DLDSR.  Street Fighter 6 also does not support exclusive fullscreen, and its frame rate is locked to 120FPS at maximum, which is definitely on the low end of what displays can achieve nowadays.

　　In the Detailed settings, users can tweak Lighting, Texture, Mesh, Shadow, Shader, Effects, Sampling, and Bloom.

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　　Needless to say, I've turned everything to the maximum available setting before launching the Street Fighter 6 Benchmark. The test run lasts just over eight minutes, going through three main sections: Fighting Ground, Battle Hub, and World Tour.

　　The first section, the most important one since it represents where the fighting actually takes place, is unfortunately locked to 60FPS regardless of the maximum frame rate mentioned above. That is because game logic is tied to frame rate, which is very disappointing in a 2023 game.

　　Besides that, the RE Engine performs well even in this genre. We've come to expect great things from the engine, but so far, it had only produced games in the action/adventure genre. Street Fighter 6 is a great showcase of its flexibility, both from a visual and performance standpoint, and it provides hope that the engine can handle multiple genres ahead of its most trying challenge, the open world of Dragon's Dogma 2.

　　As you can see from the Street Fighter 6 benchmark video (and the featured image), my RTX 4090 and i7 12700KF can nearly max that 120FPS cap. The game also looks good, although some aliasing is noticeable when roaming around in the Battle Hub and especially in the World Tour mode.

　　Unfortunately, there is no way to fix that right now. As I've said above, downsampling isn't available in the game, and it does not support NVIDIA DLSS, let alone DLAA. Both of them could be modded into the game with PureDark's RE Engine mod, but that would only be feasible when playing offline, whereas much of the game's experience is tied to being online.

　　Indeed, a few features we've previously seen in RE Engine games, like upscalers (DLSS, FSR, XeSS) and ray tracing, are weirdly missing in this release. The upscalers could definitely help lower end configurations achieve higher frame rates.

　　That and the fights being locked to 60 frames per second are the caveats mentioned in the headline. Still, Street Fighter 6 gets the basics right.

　　Head to this page to check our freshly published perfect score full review of the game.