![[DETAILED GUIDE] Optimising Ultra Street Fighter IV for <a href=](https://steamsolo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/detailed-guide-optimising-ultra-street-fighter-iv-for-online-play-ultra-street-fighter-iv.jpg)
Online Play for Ultra Street Fighter IV" width="740" height="458" />Online Play for Ultra Street Fighter IV" width="740" height="458" />
Street Fighter 4 has had a rough transition from Games for Windows Live to Steamworks. A combination of Steam bugs and Capcom apathy has resulted in an online experience that leaves players frustrated and ignored.
Whilst we cannot solve the problems directly, we can greatly improve our online experience by ensuring our own settings are optimal.
This guide is partly based off an outdated guide for AE 2012 created by Bilbo Sandbaggins.
The single most important setting for online play in Steamworks is forwarding the multiplayer ports required for Peer to Peer play. If at least one user does not have full open connectivity then Steam falls back on NAT punching and relaying which seems to cause no end of trouble in Ultra Street Fighter IV.
From the Steam support page, the most important ports to forward are as follow:
TCP 27014 to 27050 inclusive (Steam downloads)
UDP 27000 to 27015 inclusive (Game client traffic)
UDP 27015 to 27030 inclusive (Typically Matchmaking and HLTV)
UDP 4380
It is critical that your firewall and/or router is forwarding incoming packets to these ports to your computer, a major cause of stuttering and lagging whilst in training room with ranked match search on is due to lack of open ports.
Note that the following ports have to be allowed out of your firewall/router, in order for Steam to work correctly.
UDP 3478 (Outbound)
UDP 4379 (Outbound)
UDP 4380 (Outbound)
Many university networks and proxies block required ports for Steam operation, if you are unable to foward the ports Ultra Street Fighter IV requires then you will have a degraded online experience.
Forwarding ports depends very much on how your network configuration is set up and is left as an exercise for the reader. Useful resources include [link] for guides on how to set up forwarding on your specific router.
Below is a screenshot of a correctly port forwarded profile for Steam games and by extension, USFIV. If you don’t own a TG582n, then your configuration will appear differently.
Networking is a metal linked chain, it will only work as desired if every link plays its part.
Once you have correctly forwarded your Steam ports to your computer, it’s time to make sure the information is travelling from your router to your pc correctly.
Factors that you can control which affect your online experience include:
Internet bandwidth usage
If you or someone else on the same internet pipe as you is saturating the upload and/or download, you will suffer increased lag and delay. Keep your internet usage below the capacity of your internet pipe.
Packet loss to your computer
If information is lost in transit to your pc, your game will stutter and lag as it has to wait for a replacement packet to arrive. This can happen frequently on a WiFi connection. Be a smart guy, use an ethernet cable or equivalent, WiFi is so prone to enviromental factors that it’s not worth your effort to try and resolve it. If you cannot run an ethernet cable directly to your router, consider using powerline adapters, they are cheap and effective.
Up to date network software
Rarely do people update their networking drivers, this isn’t normally nessesary as they are reasonably mature these days. However bugs do occur and it’s worth spending five minutes of your time to update them, just in case.
Once the multiplayer information is being correctly routed/forwarded to your pc and you’ve made every effort to reduce problems on your own home network, now is the time to check that your pc can run Ultra Street Fighter IV at the correct speed.
Ultra Street Fighter IV is pretty rare for a modern 3d application in that the entire game is timed and locked to a 60hz clock. If at any time the game fails to maintain its speed then it either slows down or starts skipping frames. This is so 90s.
Luckily modern pcs are mostly powerful enough to run the game at full speed, so this is less of a problem than it used to be.
Your friend in this quest is Mr. Benchmark, you can find this tool on the main menu, tweak the ingame settings up or down until you achieve a Rank A in the benchmark.
If you only do one thing in this guide, foward the Steam ports, the benefits gained are substantial. I have seen night and day differences in game play when people correctly set up their router. Hopefully one day Capcom will spend a precious few weeks diagnosing the NAT issues and produce a fix, until then, it’s up to you to make sure that your configuration is the best you can make it, not to excuse Capcom but to improve your own online experience and that of others.
Please post coherent and relevent questions below and I will try to answer them if necessary.
Question – I can’t achieve a Rank A in the benchmark!
Answer – Reduce your settings in the graphics options, lower the resolution, remove anti aliasing.
Question – I have reduce all my settings to lowest and I still can’t achieve a Rank A in the benchmark!
Answer – Set your ‘framerate’ in the graphics options to ‘fixed’, your game will skip any frames it cannot render in time, this will cause the game to stutter a bit but it’s better than nothing. Otherwise upgrade your computer.
Question – I’m lagging and stuttering in the training mode when I search for a ranked game, it especially lags just before I find a new opponent to challenge
Answer – You haven’t forwarded the Steam ports correctly, Steam NAT traversal is lagging up the steam client and causing delays and stutters.
Ultra Street Fighter® IV
