A few days ago Street Fighter 6 was available as a demo on PlayStation consoles. Well, great news for Deckers and PC gamers alike: the same demo is now available on Steam. Gameplay footage is available on YouTube.

But beware, it’s gonna leave a hole in your SSD’s “wallet”. It takes up 16.7 GB of space.

I briefly played the game on Deck. Though it’s not a requirement, I’d recommend using GE-Proton to ensure better video compatibility. The game runs fine with vanilla Proton 8, but you’ll get that missing media codec image for the intro video.

Second, don’t use anything higher than Normal graphics settings. Even with the preset set to Normal, there are going to be frame dips here and there in the Story Mode, and certain maps. I recommend setting the preset to Low, and then adjusting the max framerate to 60 from the in-game Options menu; by default on Low the max FPS is set to 30. As this is obviously a fighting game, I don’t recommend using a framerate any lower than 60 FPS.

Third, I wouldn’t even bother adjusting the TDP or GPU clock speed. The game is pretty demanding, and will consume around 18 W on average. Unfortunately based on my testing it is not possible to make use of FSR and lowering the game resolution; you’re locked to 1280 x 720 and can’t adjust this. There isn’t even a fullscreen option; just Windowed or Borderless Windowed options. If the game was using Unreal Engine like its predecessor, there might be a “hack” for forcing a lower resolution, but since SF6 is using Capcom’s proprietary RE Engine, I’m not aware of any workarounds for the time being.

That being said, I would give SF6 a “Playable” Steam Deck rating. You can definitely play it, but keep the graphics settings to Low or Lowest. I’m hoping by the time the full game launches June 2 there will be a “fullscreen” option and resolution support that’s lower than 1280 x 720.

Get the demo on Steam.