Street Fighter IV Benchmark

Capcom's Street Fighter IV is part of the now-famous Street Fighter series that began in 1987. The 2D Street Fighter II was one of the most popular fighting games of the 1990s, and now gets a 3D face-lift to become Street Fighter 4. The Street Fighter 4 benchmark utility was released as a novel way to test your system's ability to run the game. It uses a few dressed-up fight scenes where combatants fight against each other using various martial arts disciplines. Feet, fists and magic fill the screen with a flurry of activity. Due to the rapid pace, varied lighting and the use of music this is one of the more enjoyable benchmarks.

Street Fighter IV uses a proprietary Capcom SF4 game engine, which is enhanced over previous versions of the game. While modern desktop computers with discrete graphics have no problem playing Street Fighter IV at its highest graphical settings, integrated and mobile GPUs have a difficult time producing playable frame rates with the lowest settings configured.

TEST SUMMARY: In terms of 3D graphical demand, Street Fighter IV is considered very low-end for most desktop GPUs. However, mobile graphics processors haven't quite caught up with discrete video cards, and the strain is evident. Configured to 1280x720 (720p) with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled, only the NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GPU GPU inside the ASRock ION-330 HTPC could produce decent frame rates. The ION 330 delivered 22.4 FPS on average, compared to 18.2 FPS on the ASRock Core 100HT, and only 8.7 FPS with the 1.3GHz Intel Pentium SU4100/Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD.

Based on all of the tests conducted up to this point, I can surmise that synthetic graphics performance is not at all representative to real-world 3D gaming performance with the Core i3/Intel GMA HD graphics processor... especially when Street Fighter IV is involved.

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