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, withGuilty Gear Striveoffering 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 thatGuilty Gear Strivelooks like a Game Boy Advance title.
A YouTube video from FGCdraft breaks down several key steps to set the mod up thatGuilty Gear Striveplayers can follow in order to play the game onold PC hardware. The title is “Guilty Gear StrivePotato 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.
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The start of the process makes the largest change visually. It tasks players with usingGuilty Gear Strive’ssettingsto scale down to 25 percent resolution, put all options on “Low,” and drop to 640 x 400 resolution. These settings will makeGuilty 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 theGuilty Gear Strivemod’s installation. This mod’s priority is to improveGuilty 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 aSuper Smash Bros.Final Destination stageon 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 anArc System Worksgame.
MostGuilty Gear Striveplayers won’t have to deal with dropping their game settings or mods. Most PC setups can handleGuilty Gear Strive’s impressive graphics will relative ease. Still, it’s a nice reminder that not everyPC gameris playing on cutting-edge hardware, and that the fighting game community still does what it can to keep them playing.
Guilty Gear Striveis available now on PC, PS4, and PS5.
