Đánh giá hiệu năng Phantom Blade Zero trên PC: Sức mạnh Unreal Engine 5 và hướng dẫn tối ưu

S-GAME's long-awaited Phantom Blade Zero is finally here, and the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. The wuxia-inspired action RPG currently boasts an impressive 88 Metascore on PC, while our own Wccftech review awarded it a perfect 10/10, cementing its position as a serious Game of the Year contender.

On PC, Phantom Blade Zero runs on Unreal Engine 5.7.4 and offers a comprehensive graphics package, including hardware ray tracing, path tracing, DLSS 4.5, FSR 4.1, and XeSS 2.0. Unfortunately, the game can also be extremely demanding, even on high-end hardware, particularly with ray tracing or path tracing enabled.

Fortunately, sensible graphics optimization can recover a considerable amount of performance. In our testing, our optimized graphics settings improved average FPS by 39%, 1% lows by 38%, and 0.1% lows by 34% compared to Ultra, with relatively minor visual compromises.

In this guide, we'll examine the PC version's technical presentation, CPU performance, graphics settings, and establish an optimized configuration that provides the best overall balance between performance and visual quality.

Graphics And Technical Overview

Phantom Blade Zero is a visually impressive game, particularly when it comes to its character models, atmospheric environments, and lighting. Character rendering is especially noteworthy during cinematics, where high-quality models and strand-based hair produce excellent results.

Environmental geometry is generally convincing, although the level of detail isn't quite as consistently impressive as in some other high-end Unreal Engine 5 productions. Some models and textures also appear strangely low-resolution, occasionally looking as though their highest-quality assets haven't loaded correctly. Thankfully, asset and model pop-in is relatively minimal.

The game's use of Unreal Engine 5's rendering technologies has also been somewhat confusing. In fact, in a 2023 interview with Wccftech, S-GAME confirmed that Lumen and Nanite were being used. However, Digital Foundry's analysis of the Gamescom 2025 demo found no apparent use of Lumen or Virtual Shadow Maps, with lighting that appeared largely precomputed.

Interestingly, NVIDIA's launch-day technical overview describes hardware-accelerated Lumen global illumination being replaced by ReSTIR GI when path tracing is enabled. Meanwhile, ComputerBase's technical analysis identifies software Lumen for lighting and reflections, but not hardware Lumen.

Our own observations suggest that software Lumen-style signed distance field reflections are present at higher Reflection Quality settings, while Nanite appears to be used selectively rather than across every environmental asset. The precise global illumination and shadowing pipelines remain less clear.

Regardless of the underlying implementation, the game looks quite good without hardware ray tracing. Enabling RT improves shadows and reflections, while path tracing produces the biggest improvements to indirect lighting, with more natural bounced illumination, color bleeding, reflections, and water caustics. The latter uses ReSTIR GI and requires NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction, making it exclusive to GeForce RTX hardware.

Unfortunately, both RT and PT are as demanding as one might expect, and temporal upscaling/machine learning-assisted denoising becomes practically essential at higher resolutions, even on powerful GPUs.

Shader Compilation And Traversal Stutters

Thankfully, Phantom Blade Zero features a lengthy shader/PSO compilation step before gameplay, which successfully eliminates the overwhelming majority of shader compilation stutters.

Some PSO-related hitches can still slip through, while occasional traversal stutters are also present. However, these are generally uncommon and rarely severe.

Enabling ray tracing or path tracing can introduce additional intermittent traversal hitches, potentially associated with the sudden construction or updating of ray-tracing acceleration structures, although we cannot definitively confirm the cause.

Overall, frame time consistency is reasonably good for an Unreal Engine 5 game of this complexity.

HDR Support

High Dynamic Range (HDR) is supported, and thankfully, the game allows players to enable or disable it independently of Windows' HDR setting.

There is also a dedicated HDR calibration menu with three adjustable parameters: HDR Peak Brightness, HDR Mid Brightness, and HDR UI Brightness.

The implementation looks quite good on our HDR display, with bright highlights, convincing contrast, and deep blacks without obvious black crush. The calibration options also provide enough flexibility to adjust the presentation to different HDR monitors.

Official PC System Requirements

S-GAME has published two system requirements tiers covering 1080p at 30 FPS and 1440p at 60 FPS.

Both configurations explicitly require temporal upscaling, with ray tracing and path tracing disabled.

Thankfully, the CPU requirements are relatively modest, with both the minimum and recommended specifications listing fairly old processors from Intel and AMD. The memory requirements are equally reasonable, with just 16 GB of RAM specified for both tiers, suggesting that 32 GB isn't necessary for a smooth experience. The recommended RTX 3060 Ti/RX 6700 XT GPU tier is also relatively modest on paper, although the reliance on upscaling to achieve 60 FPS at 1440p is worth emphasizing. An SSD is mandatory, with the game requiring a substantial 145 GB of storage space.

CPU Performance Testing

CPU performance was tested in a small village containing several enemy NPCs, with the benchmark incorporating combat and camera movement across the environment. The scene provides a useful workload for testing CPU-side performance, including NPC simulation, rendering, and the additional overhead associated with ray tracing and path tracing.

Without ray tracing, our Core i7-14700K delivers an excellent 202.1 FPS average, with 133.8 FPS 1% lows and 96.4 FPS 0.1% lows. Although occasional frametime spikes appear, the game generally maintains frame delivery around 4–6 ms during this run.

Enabling ray tracing reduces average performance to 134.4 FPS, representing a substantial 33.5% decrease. Interestingly, the 1% lows decline by a smaller 23.6%, while the 0.1% lows barely change, dropping from 96.4 to 95.3 FPS.

Path tracing pushes average performance down further to 125.6 FPS, a 37.9% reduction compared to rasterization. The 1% lows fall by 27.5%, while the 0.1% lows decline by approximately 10.8%.