Phantom Blade Zero best PC settings

Put together with lower ground clutter, an optimized set at 1440p DLSS Balanced ran 71 fps on average against 46 for the Ultra preset in the same area, with 1% lows of 54 against 32.

Low and Medium shadows gain nothing over High on that card and strip most shadows from the scene, so High is the floor worth keeping.

Row names as the PC menu prints them. Some rows change with the upscaler: picking FSR swaps the DLSS mode for Super Resolution Quality and adds a sharpness slider.

Under the preset come 17 detail rows: Shadow Quality, Reflection Quality, Post-Processing Quality, Lighting Quality, Effects Quality, Material Quality, Ambient Occlusion Quality, Depth of Field Quality, Motion Blur Quality, Anti-Aliasing, View Distance, Character Texture Quality, Character Model Quality, High-Quality Hair (Off or On), Environment Texture Quality, Environment Model Quality and Environment Detail Quality.

The Display tab holds Output Display, Window Mode, Resolution, Frame Rate Limit, V-Sync, HDR ("Requires an HDR-compatible display.") and Image Calibration. There is no Volumetric Fog row.

On the RTX 3060 Ti at 1440p DLSS Quality and the Ultra preset, ray tracing cost 8 fps and path tracing 21. VRAM went from 7,727 MB with ray tracing off to 9,008 MB with path tracing.

An RTX 5070 Ti at 4K with DLSS Quality read 41 fps with ray tracing and 36 with path tracing on single frames, and 56 and 52 at DLSS Performance. With path tracing and 6x Frame Generation at 4K, VRAM reached 14,018 MB.

Ray Reconstruction came out faster than plain ray tracing on one RTX 5070 run and slower on the RTX 3060 Ti, so no single cost holds for it yet.

The GTX 1650 sits below the official minimum, a GTX 1660, and still runs: 57 fps at 1080p Low with FSR 3 Quality, using 3.5 to 3.7 GB of VRAM. The RTX 3050 runs best at Medium with DLSS Quality; High costs it 20 fps.

The official tiers are on the PC requirements page.

An RTX 50 card gets every mode: Off, 2x to 6x, and Dynamic. GTX 16 and RTX 30 cards run FSR Frame Generation instead, and a GTX 1650 used it at 2x.

Frame Generation 2x took the RTX 4060 from 81 to 120 fps at 1080p High with DLSS Quality. On the RTX 5070 at 1440p with path tracing it went from 58 to 104 fps, while the 1% low fell from 49 to 39.

Leave V-Sync off with it. The menu warns: "V-Sync is enabled. Enabling Frame Generation may significantly reduce the base frame rate. We recommend disabling V-Sync for more stable performance."

The SteamOS run shows the game working under Proton on a Linux handheld. No Steam Deck test has been confirmed yet.

The save folder holds PBZSaveGame.sav, about 5 KB, three backup folders named 1RealTime, 2Hourly and 3Daily, and a steam_autocloud.vdf file, so Steam Cloud keeps a copy. GameUserSettings.ini stores the detail rows under [ScalabilityGroups], such as sg.ShadowQuality and sg.TextureQuality.