If you like flying Russians, you'll like Street Fighter 4
Interested in Street Fighter IV? Don’t have a console? Excited about the upcoming PC release? Not sure if your PC can handle it though? Well, today is your lucky day! The good folks at Capcom released a benchmark for the PC version, it weighs in about 400 megs and you can download it from Fileshack. It has 3 bouts between some of the fighters filled with hadoken’s and whatever else, all kinds of nice effects and shit, probably designed to stress the machine somewhat the same way a real bout would. It has a good number of graphics options to tweak if you need to, but the good news is that it seems like the final product will be lean and mean PC version. I was able to run the bench on my system with constant 60 frames per second with all settings in high, at my native 1680×1050 resolution, and it looks pretty great. Well, all settings high except for antialiasing, but who needs antialiasing at this resolution and in a game like this. It looks fantastic. There are also few interesting post processing effects that you can apply to the image, watercolour, ink and posterizing. I’m undecided if they look interesting or not, but the good news is that I was still able to run at full 60 frames per sec, so if you choose to use those they don’t seem to hurt the performance at all. Though your mileage may vary. All in all, looks like it will be a good version.
So, that gives me great hope that the PC versions for Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet 2 will also be great. Capcom and PC’s looked pretty bad for a while there back in the day when Devil May Cry 3 and Resident Evil 4 was ported for PC. DMC3 was just horrible game and even more terrible port. And RE4 was, while functional, really ugly quick port. At least with RE4 they updated it with some lighting effects later which made it a little less horrible, and fans have made a huge effort to mod it with higher resolution textures and all that.
But that was last gen consoles. For this gen consoles and the PC, Capcom made a new engine called MT Framework, which is basically a development framework that runs on the PC, and is the kind of ported to the consoles, at least according to one of the developers behind DMC4. This shows in super awesome PC versions, Lost Planet and Devil May Cry 4 for example both run on PC like a dream. This same MT Framework is also the engine in Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet 2, so I expect them both to run like a dream as well. Capcom has really learned their lesson with these things and their approach to multiplatform games is great. Street Fighter 4 doesn’t run on MT Framework I think though, but who cares, it runs great regardless.
Now, if they’d just make it so that other developers could license the engine as well, so we could finally rid the world of the terrible Unreal 3 engine.
