The performance of Tekken 8 on PC isn’t a new concern within the community, but my time with the demo has left me with fresh anxiety that it may not live up to expectations.
Tekken 8 will want to be considered among the best fighting games on PC, but if the demo is anything to judge by, it needs some serious optimization before that becomes a reality.
During my time with the Tekken 8 demo, a few problems had a considerable impact on my time with the game. Firstly, the audio lag present during the character select screen and fight introductions is frustrating. It was inconsistent, but present more often than not, and was also paired with graphical stuttering. This mostly disappears when the action gets underway, but makes the journey into a match a little less impactful.
Next up was the performance of both in-engine and pre-rendered cutscenes. Remarkably, CapFrameX reported massive frame drops during pre-rendered cutscenes, which simply makes no sense and only points toward an optimization issue. They are also considerably lower quality than any of the in-engine visuals. As for the in-engine cutscenes, while the drops are less severe, it’s still frustrating and difficult to stay immersed in Tekken 8’s notoriously ridiculous storytelling when the performance is lacking.
Finally, the least severe but most concerning problem arises during gameplay. While sometimes imperceptible, and other times outright disruptive, frame drops during fights are an issue. Granted, this is limited to when the action gets very busy, like during special moves, but anything that could impact response time in a fighting game could be considered catastrophic.
I tested the Tekken 8 demo on the same testing rig that we use for all games on PCGamesN. It includes an Intel Core i7 11700F, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, and 32GB of RAM.
In airing on the side of optimism, it could be that these issues are fixed in the full release of Tekken 8, but given how many examples of poorly optimized games released in 2023, it’s hard to be completely confident, even if early signs suggest that Tekken 8 will at least run well on the Steam Deck.
The Tekken 8 release date will be here soon, so check out the Tekken 8 system requirements to make sure your rig can handle the demands.