It’s been a week since Street Fighter 6 was announced for the Nintendo Switch 2. As I’m sure many of you thought, this could be a nice supplementary version of the game. A large number of fighting game players are loyal to PlayStation, but there’s also a growing player base on Xbox, and especially on Steam. Many gamers probably thought of buying this as an extra version because they can have a version that’s on the go.
But as it turns out, it could be more than that.
The hype around Street Fighter 6 on the Switch 2 started when people started making comparison videos with the game on other consoles. For those who were curious, what these people did was watch the footage from Nintendo Treehouse Live, and then make videos to match the same scenarios and cutscenes on other consoles.
So there’s an ad hoc nature to these comparisons, and we will still need to wait on the likes of Digital Foundry to make performance analysis of the game when it finally hits retail. But there’s still something stunning about what we’ve already found out.
The ball started rolling with this comparison video for Street Fighter 6 on PlayStation 4, Switch 2, and PlayStation 5. Doctre81 was able to verbalize his observations, and we’ll summarize them for you below.
According to Doctre81, there is no question that the Switch 2 version runs better than the PlayStation 4. However, there are some situations where the Switch 2 seems to outperform even the PlayStation 5.
For example, the Switch 2 sometimes shows more graphical details. Zangief and Ryu have more detailed hair, and you can see their skin pores. On the flip side, the PlayStation 5 could have an additional lighting pass, which gives it more realistic lighting that could also obscure these details.
Doctre81 also noticed that in some scenes, the PlayStation 5 demonstrates depth of field by blurring out some backgrounds where the PlayStation 4 and Switch 2 does not. While that may reflect on more technically proficient hardware, for a 2.5 D fighting game, that seems unnecessary, and may accidentally make the PlayStation 5 look weaker.
But there are some telltale signs that the Switch 2 isn’t quite as powerful. For how closely it matches the PlayStation 5 in visuals, if you take a close look you can see some NPCs go missing.
While we’ve been naming the Switch and the PlayStation brands here, this really feels more like a proxy war between PlayStation’s SOC supplier, AMD, and Nintendo’s SOC supplier, Nvidia. Nvidia has been a fierce competitor to AMD for decades, and has arguably been a better and more consistent GPU manufacturer than AMD has been through the years.
With the original Switch, Nvidia was able to demonstrate that it was possible to bring true console quality graphics to a gaming handheld, an innovation that they pioneered nearly a decade before AMD introduced their Ryzen Z1 Extreme. With the preponderance of AMD powered gaming handhelds, running both SteamOS and Windows, and AMD locking down both PlayStation and Xbox contracts, one can see that Nvidia has a chip on their shoulder.
So one can understand why Nvidia would have given Nintendo every trick in the book they can muster to make the Switch 2 compete gamely as a true 9th generation console. But that even isn’t the end of this story.
As you may have heard, Twitter user slimebigmoney came out of a Switch 2 demo event claiming that the Switch 2 version of Street Fighter 6 has lower latency than the PlayStation 5 version. That means the Switch 2 version is actually better for competitive play.
In this case, this isn’t really about Nintendo and Nvidia doing better, but something lacking in either Capcom’s or Sony’s side. Because the lag input and low latency issues of the PlayStation 5 version of Street Fighter 6 has been known for years. Just a few months ago, FGC players were arguing that tournaments need to drop the PlayStation 5 because the game notoriously runs inconsistently compared to PC.
Of course, it would be easy to assemble a PC build that can run Street Fighter 6 better than the Switch 2. But this still speaks favorably of Nintendo’s new platform, and it suggests the FGC, and ‘hardcore gamers’ of all kinds, may also have to take the Switch 2 more seriously too.
But we’ll let you judge for yourselves. You can watch the Street Fighter 6 PlayStation 4 vs. Switch 2 vs. PlayStation 5 comparison video below.
