Not Even a 5090 Can Save Marvel Tokon on PC

Arc System Works promised PC players that a day-one patch would clean up the performance problems that plagued Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls during its open beta last month. The game launched yesterday, the patch shipped, and by all accounts the same stuttering and frame drops are still there. The difference between a beta problem and a launch problem is that one of them costs people money.

As one player explained in a Steam review, you can throw the most powerful consumer hardware on the planet at this game and it won't matter. Running an RTX 5090 paired with a Ryzen 9800X3D at the lowest settings still produces stutters and frame drops. The issue is on Arc System Works' end, not yours. You can't brute-force your way past broken optimisation, and Marvel Tokon's Steam page currently sits at 'Mixed' reviews as a result. Other fighting games like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 run at a locked 60fps on the same hardware that Marvel Tokon chokes on. Players have noticed, and they're not being quiet about it.

Several reviews point the finger at Sony's mandatory PSN overlay, claiming it tanks performance by being unnecessarily resource-intensive. Others say the game is simply poorly optimised regardless. Linux users, meanwhile, can't even launch the game, which blocks it entirely on Steam Deck and Steam Machine hardware. The anti-cheat being used reportedly isn't compatible with Linux. For a game backed by Sony's live-service ambitions, shipping without Steam Deck support in 2026 is a baffling omission.

The PS5 Spillover

Here's where it gets worse: the PC port's problems aren't just a PC issue anymore. Because Marvel Tokon uses rollback netcode, your opponent's frame drops directly affect match quality. PS5 players, who by all reports are running the game without issues, have started disabling crossplay to avoid being matched with stuttering PC opponents. A broken port is now actively degrading the experience for people on hardware where the game works fine. I've seen PC ports drag a game's reputation down before, but rarely do they reach across platforms and make the console version worse too.

Arc System Works has acknowledged the issues and says the team is actively investigating. That's the minimum response, and given that the open beta surfaced these exact problems weeks ago, "investigating" doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. The studio had a clear window to delay the PC launch or at least set expectations. Instead, it shipped the same broken build with a patch that apparently fixed very little.

Sony's PC porting track record keeps getting longer entries in the wrong column. On top of the performance problems, over 100 countries can't even purchase Marvel Tokon on PC because PSN isn't officially supported in those regions. If Sony wants to push its live-service titles onto PC to maximise player counts, it needs to actually invest in making those ports work. Shipping a fighting game with unstable frame rates is bad enough in a single-player title; in a competitive game where every dropped frame translates to missed inputs and desynced rollback, it's a dealbreaker.

The core fighting game underneath all of this might be excellent. Arc System Works has a pedigree that includes Guilty Gear Strive and Dragon Ball FighterZ, and the PS5 version appears to run well. But none of that matters to the PC player who just paid full price for a game that stutters on a 5090.