Can You Run Street Fighter 6 on Integrated Graphics? [iGPU] - GamersDirector (2024)

Capcom’s Street Fighter 6 is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most anticipated games of 2023 and, well, naturally so — it’s been a hot minute since the last installment of this legendary fighting game series.

We’ve waited for over seven years to experience a true “next-gen” Street Fighter and that day, luckily for us, is right around the corner! The full game is slated for release on June 2nd; in the meantime, however, Capcom was nice enough to give us all a closer look at the game and its inner workings through a widely available demo.

There are only two characters available [Luke and Ryu], but that’s still more than enough if you’re just looking to get the grips with the game and tackle its fundamentals.

Can it run on integrated graphics, though? That’s what we’re most interested in, so let’s dive straight into the nitty-gritty!

Street Fighter 6 Minimum System Requirements

Before we delve into the benchmarks and analysis, we first need to cover the minimum and recommended system requirements imposed by Capcom. To run Street Fighter 6, you’ll need the following:

First of all, Street Fighter 6 not only looks great but also requires a pretty solid set-up in order to run properly, at a respectable resolution with everything cranked up. The engine it’s running on is pretty forgiving overall (despite its proprietary nature), which leads us to believe that Capcom still has a while to go before the game itself is as optimized as its forerunners.

And, well, it’s quite a demanding game for what it is. A GTX 1060 as the minimum? It is the third most used graphics card in the world (for gaming purposes) according to Steam’s Hardware Survey, but it should by no means be deemed as the baseline for a fighting game.

Then again, today’s games have gotten a lot more complex and visually demanding, so that probably shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise.

All of this, in essence, means that you shouldn’t expect spectacular performance if you’re running integrated graphics. We’ve tested Street Fighter 6 on two different laptops and the results are… acceptable and solid, but also a bit lacking.

Street Fighter 6 iGPU Performance — AMD Ryzen 6800U [680M, RDNA 2]

We’ve done our testing on an ASUS Zenbook S13 OLED. It features a 28W implementation of the Ryzen 6800U which comes imbued with AMD’s 680M integrated graphics [RNDA 2]. It is, in short, the most capable iGPU on the market, and that’ll keep on being the case until it is eventually superseded by the 780M in a few months’ time.

It is a low-powered SoC which, naturally, limits its gaming performance (especially over prolonged periods of time), but it’s still a surprisingly capable APU. That, however, doesn’t mean you’ll be able to crank up the settings and be up-and-running in no time.

Far from it, in fact.

After hours of testing, we’ve concluded that — for the best possible experience — you’ll need to run the game at 1080p but with the render resolution set to 4 (out of the maximum 5). Now, that might not sound all that amazing, but, with the right settings, the game does run at a very stable 60 FPS and, frankly, it doesn’t look as bad as the settings would imply.

We were able to get our desired frame rate with the following settings:

• Lighting Quality: Normal
• Texture Quality: High
• Mesh Quality: Low
• Shadow Quality: Low
• Shader Quality: Low
• Effects Quality: Lowest
• Sampling Quality: Standard
• Bloom: Off

As for the Basic Graphic Settings, we turned off quite literally everything other than VSync. That includes Ambient Occlusion, Motion Blur, Screen Space Reflection, Subsurface Scattering, Antialiasing, and Depth of Field.

You can turn on antialiasing, but you’ll have to lower the in-game render resolution from 4 to 3 (on 1080p) to retain the stable 60 FPS. The game looks a lot better, but it’s also a bit muddied visually which, to some, may well be more preferable.

Here’s how the game looks with the aforementioned settings and antialiasing turned on:

Turning on antialiasing results in a more pleasing image — one that is easier on the eyes — but it does require you to render the game at a lower resolution. Still, it’s a worthwhile trade-off, all things considered.

Note: The game looks a lot better once everything is motion; you don’t even notice a good chunk of the artifacting, the jagged edges, general fuzziness, and whatnot. So just have that in mind while you’re dissecting these frames.

The backgrounds are pretty austere, the hair looks awful, and the lighting and shadows leave a bit to be desired (an understatement), but once you start throwing punches and kicks and whatnot, it’s actually a very enjoyable experience.

We do prefer the antialiased look, but to each their own.

How to Get a Stable 60 FPS in Street Fighter 6 [iGPU]

To achieve as good a level of performance as possible, make sure to do the following:

• Install the latest drivers [23.4.3 at the time of this writing]
• Set your laptop to Performance mode (so that it can draw the most amount of power) and set the Windows 11 Power Mode to “Best Performance.”
• Once you’re in Street Fighter 6, go to Options > Game > Other Settings and switch the Shader Warming on Startup from “Not Perform” to “Perform.” That way, once you restart the game, it’ll compile all necessary shaders, and — in most cases — boost in-game performance.
• In AMD’s Adrenaline software, go to Performance > Tuning and set the Memory Optimizer to “Gaming.” That will automatically dedicate 2GB of your total pool of available RAM to the iGPU. The integrated graphics will take up a lot more than that (through Shared Memory), but having those two gigabytes (as opposed to a measly 512MB) sure does make a world of difference.
• While you’re there, you can also go to Gaming > Global Graphics and then play around with the supplied Graphics Options. Radeon Super Resolution, Radeon Boost, and Radeon Image Sharpening are all fairly powerful tools. Whether any of them will give you the performance uplift you’re after is up for debate, but it’s good to have the option, especially for those who like to tinker around with their settings.

Overall, we’re quite pleased with the way it performs on AMD’s latest and greatest integrated graphics, although we’d be lying if we didn’t say that we expected a bit more.

There’s also no DLSS or FSR (or XeSS, for that matter), so gamers can’t employ any upscaling wizardry to attain smoother frame rates.

If you have an RDNA 2-based mini PC, you will get better performance, but don’t expect any miracles. The game is still fairly demanding and, most likely, not as optimized as we had hoped. Still, with a higher TDP and some blazing fast RAM, you might be able to reach the 1080p mark with most settings set to Normal or, potentially, High.

Street Fighter 6 iGPU Performance — AMD Ryzen 5800H [Vega 8]

We also gave Street Fighter 6 a “spin” on a Ryzen-based laptop with the (fairly outdated) AMD Vega iGPU and the results were actually quite surprising. It’s not as good of an experience as the one on the 680M, but the game’s definitely playable at 60 FPS. You’ll have to lower the settings fully and play solely on 720p, but the performance itself isn’t half bad for an iGPU that’s quite old and “outdated.”

Here’s how it looks:

Those integrated graphics are a bit more powerful than Vega ones from AMD, but the difference isn’t all that substantial — you might get a few more frames but the overall experience will largely remain the same.

Also, if you happen to have, say, the Ryzen 5600G, you’ll be able to play the game at 900p without any issue, with a constant ±55 FPS — and, again, lowered settings. You can also play at 1080p but only after lowering the render resolution.

You can watch the following video to see it in action:

You can download the Street Fighter 6 beta on all platforms [PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S|X] and test it out to your heart’s content. It doesn’t provide a whole lot of replay value, to be fair, but it’s still a nice foretaste of what’s to come on June 2nd!

Can I Run Street Fighter 6 on a Steam Deck?

Absolutely, albeit at the lowest graphical settings. The Steam Deck’s APU simply isn’t capable of drawing as much power as the Ryzen 6800U, hence to worse performance.

If you set all settings to Low, achieving 60 FPS (with some added tinkering) is possible, so that’s definitely a good sign. And, who knows, if Capcom ends up optimizing it even further, Steam Deck owners may well end up having a stellar experience.

The fact that Valve’s handheld gaming PC has a 720p display means that the game looks a lot better than it does on a 13” laptop, so that’s definitely a plus. In other words: lowered settings won’t impact the overall experience all that much.

You can check it out in action down below: