With Tekken 8 on the horizon and no PlayStation 4 or Xbox One versions for it, some fans are going to have to make the decision to pick up the new consoles or go with the PC.
The closed beta test for Tekken 8 this weekend gave me the opportunity to try out the game for the first time on my PC that barely hits the minimum specs required, and this was my experience.
For clarity, my computer seems to be slightly above the minimum of an Nvidia GTX 1050Ti GPU and AMD 5 1600 CPU with my Nvidia GTX 1650 and AMD 5 3500 with 8 GB of RAM — so my experience is probably a bit better than the true floor of what’s recommended.
Booting up the beta for the first time runs a quick benchmark in the background that automatically put me at low settings across the board for 1080p, which was about what I expected.
At these low settings, Tekken 8 looks pretty fuzzy / like Vaseline was rubbed across the screen during gameplay or the Fight Lounge while menus still appear crisp in detail.
The game kept up a pretty consistent frame rate with a rock solid 60 fps during matches though there were some small dips during loading screens, the character select and intros.
Pretty much all of my online matches felt responsive and lag-free with the exception of one Wi-Fi warrior that upped the delay frames to 5 and slowed everything down to a crawl or a minor hitch here or there.
The Fight Lounge itself I couldn’t get to run more than 40–45 fps no matter the settings, and it was pretty darn blurry at low too.
Doing the minimum is far from ideal for running the game, but it is technically functional.
In my further testing, I was able to bump up the texture quality and post-processing quality to medium with rendering scale up to 70 though anything else would cause frame drops in gameplay.
This made a significant improvement on the visual presentation and readability and just a bit more drops outside of gameplay, so I’d recommend trying those out if you’ve been running all low.
Some long hair on characters like Lili could still look a bit wonky, but Tekken 8 suddenly shows a lot better if you can increase at least a few settings.
Tekken 8 seems to push the CPU a bit harder than the GPU although I never saw either actually maxed out in my performance tests during matches.
I’m not sure what it’s like on an SSD, but with my external USB HDD, it took me two minutes exactly to open the game and get to the main menu.
Bumping up the texture and post-processing quality to medium makes a big difference
Matches took around 40 seconds to load each time as well though the Fight Lounge was really fast at around 5 seconds.
On all settings, I also saw texture loading on the stages and background elements too, but those only lasted like two seconds before the gameplay started.
On the same computer, I feel as though Tekken 8 looks better than Street Fighter 6 did and even runs more consistently at 1080p as well (during gameplay at least).
With all that said, running Tekken 8 at least on medium graphics doesn’t seem like a poor option to experience the game, but if you’re in this lower range, probably not so much.
You’d be best off saving yourself for an upgrade to the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X or higher end PC to get the most out of what Tekken 8 is trying to offer.
If the minimum is your only option for the foreseeable future, however, it does appear to be at least functional and not be a detriment to online performance if tuned correctly.
This is still just the beta as well, so hopefully the full release on January 25, 2024 will be even better optimized to run and look improved on lower hardware too.
To get a closer look, we’ve also included a small gallery featuring three screenshots at the lowest settings and three more with the slightly increased graphics.
Click images for larger versions