Capcom’s major Street Fighter 5 tournament ditches PlayStation consoles for PCs

Capcom will exclusively use PCs to power its upcoming Capcom Cup tournament, which has the world’s top Street Fighter 5 players battling it out for a $300,000 prize pool. In a post on Twitter, Capcom Fighters says all matches will be played on PCs with the displays set to 144Hz.

The company doesn’t provide any information on the hardware going into these PCs (or if they’ll just use gaming laptops), but the move’s expected to reduce input lag — the time it takes for a system to translate your button press on a keyboard or controller to an action displayed on the screen. Low input lag is a necessity for pros in the fighting game scene, where a delayed punch or kick can greatly affect the outcome of a match.

Input lag on the PlayStation 4 has long been a problem for Street Fighter 5 players, and even the PlayStation 5 doesn’t seem to improve on it all that much. While the PlayStation 4 was the console of choice for Street Fighter 5 tournaments before the covid pandemic hit, Arman Hanjani, a Street Fighter pro who goes by the name Phenom in tournaments, tells The Verge that many players made the switch to PC as in-person events were canceled and more tournaments took place online.

“We have all been playing on PC mostly for the last few years,” Hanjani says. “It is where the game is most responsive.” That, coupled with the fact that the game performs better on PC is likely the catalyst behind Capcom’s decision. Other Street Fighter pros, including Arturo Sanchez, also known as Sabin, have long pushed for Street Fighter 5 tournaments to take place on PC.

We got a taste of what an all-PC Street Fighter 5 tournament could look like with last year’s MSI-sponsored Defend the North competition, but we likely can’t expect smaller tournaments to take its lead. As Supercombo.gg co-founder Kevin Higgins points out, purchasing and maintaining gaming PCs for hundreds (or even thousands) of players isn’t realistic for some event organizers.

Plus, as Higgins notes, input latency isn’t always consistent across all devices, whether it’s because one configuration is slightly different from another, or the event organizer failed to install a driver update on one of the machines. It’s easier (and less expensive) to achieve a level playing field with consoles that have more predictable levels of performance.

It’s a shame that it took seven years after the release of Street Fighter 5 for one of the biggest tournaments to allow gameplay on PC, but it’s better late than never. We’ll have to see if other major fighting game tournaments make the transition to PC (although it might not happen at Evo, since Sony partially owns it).

“This is likely the last Capcom Cup for Street Fighter 5, and it’s ending in the best way possible,” Hanjani says. “We will all be able to play at our fullest.” The Capcom Cup starts on February 12th.