Recently, the PC version of Phantom Blade Zero underwent a non-native DLSS 5 visual experiment. Testers enabled DLSS 5, which is not natively supported by the game, using the latest RHI Mod, and compared it with the default path-traced visuals. The results showed improved lighting details, but also introduced contour artifacts and performance loss.
Phantom Blade Zero is built on Unreal Engine 5, with the PC version utilizing path tracing. The test platform was equipped with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM, RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards, running on Windows 10 64-bit, with NVIDIA Game Ready driver version 621.01.
Testers found that enabling DLSS 5 significantly improved the protagonist's skin, armor, and additional shadows and lighting effects in the environment, making the overall look closer to the desired "next-gen" effect. However, white contours appeared around characters, and lighting changes were visible when moving the camera. Reducing Extra Neural Style to 6.00 or 5.00 alleviated these issues, and lowering it to 1.00 eliminated them completely, though the visual impact was also diminished.
In the comparison between default settings and Extra Neural Style 5.50, testers preferred the latter's visuals while noting its higher performance cost. In a high-load area running at 4K with DLSS 4.5 Quality mode and MFG X4, the frame rate was approximately 260 FPS without DLSS 5, around 210 FPS with default DLSS 5 settings, and about 188 FPS with custom settings. Testers believe the 5.50 setting is mainly suitable for RTX 5090 users, while RTX 5080 can achieve smooth performance at 1440p; these results are from mod experiments and do not represent the game's native DLSS 5 performance.
Comparison screenshots (top: native path tracing, bottom: DLSS 5):
