Phantom Blade Zero Release Date: October 29 on PS5 and PC, and How It Runs on Unreal Engine 5

Release date and platforms

Phantom Blade Zero releases on October 29 for PlayStation 5 and Windows PC, and turning on Path Tracing on PC costs about 50% of your frame rate compared with native Ultra. ^[1][2] If you plan to play on PC, the graphics menu matters from the first launch.

The game is made using Unreal Engine 5, version 5.7.4. ^[2] It offers increased graphics fidelity through NVIDIA's DLSS 4.5 technology and Path Tracing. ^[2]

What the graphics menu offers

The game starts with a Shader Compilation screen that takes a good amount of time. ^[2] It is a one-time process. ^[2]

Super Resolution settings let you pick TSR, NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, or Intel XeSS as the SR method. ^[2] Dynamic Resolution Quality is disabled when DLSS, XeSS, or FSR is used. ^[2]

Frame generation is built in, with AMD up to 2x, Intel up to 4x, and NVIDIA up to 6x modes. ^[2] Path Tracing is not enabled by default, and you can choose between Native Rendering, Ray Tracing, and Path Tracing. ^[2] NVIDIA RTX GPUs also support Ray Reconstruction based on DLSS 4.5, which offers better image quality in RT and PT modes. ^[2]

Preset benchmarks

In the preset benchmark, the Low preset averaged 103 FPS and the Medium preset averaged 99 FPS. ^[2] The two differ by only 3-5 FPS because lighting is the same between them. ^[2]

Moving from Medium to High causes about a 14% drop in performance, and the step from High to Very High causes about a 15% hit. ^[2] The Ultra preset yields a 6-7% drop compared with Very High. ^[2]

Ray Tracing costs 20-22% compared with native Ultra. ^[2] Path Tracing has a 35-40% FPS hit versus Ray Tracing and about 50% versus native Ultra. ^[2]

These runs were at 4K on an RTX 5090, and the author notes that results may vary with resolution and graphics card. ^[2] The test system used an Intel Core i9-13900K, an MSI MEG Z790 ACE motherboard, and 32 GB of DDR5-7600 (CL36) memory. ^[2]

Which GPUs reach 60 FPS

At native 4K, the RTX 5090 averaged 63 FPS, the RTX 4090 averaged 51 FPS, and the RTX 5080 averaged 40 FPS. ^[2] Hardly any GPUs other than the RTX 5090 can reach 60+ FPS there. ^[2]

At 1440p, 60 FPS can be achieved on cards such as the RTX 5070 Ti, RX 9070 XT, and above. ^[2] Most enthusiast-grade cards do not need frame generation, since upscaling alone can deliver over 100 FPS. ^[2]

The game itself

The protagonist Soul must find a way to survive before his magically inserted artificial heart stops working, and he has only 66 days to do so. ^[1] The game has eight maps. ^[3]

Only heavy attacks cost stamina, which is shown in Soul's Sha-Chi bar, and normal attacks do not. ^[1] Parrying is the best defensive technique because it depletes enemies' Sha-Chi bars. ^[1] Swapping between two primary weapons restores Soul's entire Sha-Chi bar, subject to a short cooldown. ^[1]

Actor Donnie Yen, known for Ip Man, is part of the project and trains the player in a questline. ^[1] That questline, in which he trains you as the mysterious gold-masked man, is a strong subplot that is often missable. ^[3]

Reviewer's problems

The reviewer died nearly 200 times during the playthrough, and roughly half of those deaths came from falls or getting caught in the environment. ^[3] The reviewer also describes occasional performance issues and bad geometry, such as invisible borders and characters getting stuck on surfaces. ^[3]