2017 has been a pretty good year for fighters, and Tekken 7 is definitely one of the best games to have come out this year in its genre. It has received significant upgrades over its predecessors in almost all areas, from the single player campaign to the much more refined competitive multiplayer. Another area that has noticeably improved in Tekken 7 is the visual department. Character design is better than ever before with incredible detail, and animations look fluid and excellent.
Among several reasons, chief is the fact that with Tekken 7, Namco Bandai have made the decision to switch to the Unreal Engine, following in the footsteps of fellow fighters Injustice and Street Fighter. Tekken 7 runs on the Unreal Engine 4, and this has a huge number of advantages. The physical collisions in the game have received a major boost, while hit impacts include detailed particle effects. Character models are much more detailed, too. Perhaps the most significant upgrade, though, is a locked frame rate of 60 frames per second. That said, how do the two current best looking versions of Tekken 7, i.e., the PS4 Pro and PC versions, compare against each other?
To find that out, we ran Tekken 7 on a PC with fully maxed out specs in order to avoid any potential bottlenecks, using a GTX 1080 Ti, with 16GB of DDR4 memory and a Ryzen 7 1700 processor. Graphical settings include Custom Rendering scale with 50% to 200% in increments of 5%, Anti-aliasing, Shadow settings, Texture quality, Effects quality, Ultra Post-processing, Motion Blur and Dynamic adjustment.
We ran the game at 1080p with every setting maxed out. The tradeoff for not having 4K is a constant, locked 60 frames per second frame rate that never dips. The PS4 Pro version of Tekken 7 is, weirdly enough, quite comparable to the PC version. The PS4 Pro runs Tekken 7 also at a locked 60 frames per second, with the resolution maxing out at 1080p. The PS4 Pro hardware doesn’t allow for upscaling on 4K TVs, but in the end it seems like a fair trade off for the solid, silky smooth frame rate. What’s more, compared to the base PS4 version of the game, which runs at a resolution of 900p, 1080p on the PS4 Pro is quite acceptable.
There’s very little to separate the PC and PS4 Pro versions of Tekken 7. Except the internal resolution scale and ultra post processing on the PC, there’s little to separate the two versions in this area. The one area where the PC version of Tekken 7 is significantly better than its PS4 Pro counterpart is the loading times. The switch to Unreal Engine 4 has allowed Namco to make a much more polished, refined Tekken game than ever before, but the downside is that there are a lot more loading times this time around, and they’re longer than you’d like.
As such, there’s not a whole lot to separate the PS4 Pro and PC versions of Tekken 7. The PC version is undoubtedly the best version, while also having much shorter loading times. So if you’re looking for the perfect Tekken 7 experience, PC is probably the way to go, though the PS4 Pro version isn’t lagging far behind either.
