Guilty Gear Strive, the latest competitive fighting game from Arc System Works, is now available on PC, PS4, and PS5. Arc System Works appears to have outdone itself, with Guilty Gear Strive offering some of the most impressive fighting game visuals the genre has seen yet. With that caliber of visuals, however, hardware requirements are also steeper than ever, so a new "Potato" mod for old PCs helps maximize framerates - with the trade-off being that Guilty Gear Strive looks like a Game Boy Advance title.
A YouTube video from FGCdraft breaks down several key steps to set the mod up that Guilty Gear Strive players can follow in order to play the game on old PC hardware. The title is "Guilty Gear Strive Potato Low Spec Mod," with the PC example used in the video featuring an Nvidia GT 540M 1GB GPU and an Intel i5-2410M 8GB CPU, which is poor hardware even for a laptop. After the mod's installation, the video shows they've reached a stable 60 FPS.
The start of the process makes the largest change visually. It tasks players with using Guilty Gear Strive's settings to scale down to 25 percent resolution, put all options on "Low," and drop to 640 x 400 resolution. These settings will make Guilty Gear Strive's 3D art turn into a heavily pixelated mess, but it is a playable mess even on a "potato" PC with between 20-25 FPS.
After another fix that alters the PC's processor affinity, adding an extra five FPS, the video gets to the Guilty Gear Strive mod's installation. This mod's priority is to improve Guilty Gear Strive's FPS, and even what's left of the game's visuals are no priority. It removes all of the game's animated backgrounds, as well as the 3D environments tied to transition screens. It may have looked like a GBA game before, but with the mod it looks like a Super Smash Bros. Final Destination stage on GBA.
The result of implementing the mod, which effectively removes a variety of background assets from the game, is significant. Guilty Gear Strive's FPS jumps from below 30 FPS to a near-stable 60 FPS. Plus, a bonus of removing the backgrounds is that combat is visually clear. It's surprisingly playable, even if it isn't recognizably an Arc System Works game.
Most Guilty Gear Strive players won't have to deal with dropping their game settings or mods. Most PC setups can handle Guilty Gear Strive's impressive graphics will relative ease. Still, it's a nice reminder that not every PC gamer is playing on cutting-edge hardware, and that the fighting game community still does what it can to keep them playing.
Guilty Gear Strive is available now on PC, PS4, and PS5.