The PC release of Phantom Blade Zero DLSS 4.5 suite covers Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation up to 6X and NVIDIA Reflex on GeForce RTX cards: Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, Dynamic Multi Frame Generation up to 6X, and NVIDIA Reflex. The ray-traced features in the game are ray-traced reflections, ray-traced shadows and ray-traced water caustics, the last of which is exclusive to path tracing, while indirect lighting uses ReSTIR GI rather than Lumen.
What the Phantom Blade Zero DLSS 4.5 suite includes
| Feature | What it does in this game |
|---|---|
| DLSS Super Resolution | Upscaling, and the frame rate target behind both the 1080p and 1440p official requirements |
| DLSS Ray Reconstruction | Switches on automatically when path tracing is enabled, replacing hand-tuned denoisers with a neural model that unifies denoising and upscaling |
| Dynamic Multi Frame Generation | Up to 6X, with an adjustable target-FPS mode |
| NVIDIA Reflex | Claims a reduction of up to 49% in PC latency, which matters more here than in most games because parries are timed |
What path tracing needs
The hardware recommendations are straightforward:
| Goal | Suggested card |
|---|---|
| Ray tracing on, 1080p at 60 FPS with upscaling | RTX 5060 8GB |
| Path tracing on, 2160p at 60 FPS with upscaling | RTX 5080 16GB |
| 4K path tracing | RTX 5080 or RTX 5090 |
| Path tracing on a laptop, 1080p | RTX 5070 Laptop |
| Path tracing on a laptop, 1440p | RTX 5080 Laptop |
Published frame rates at maximum settings with path tracing and Multi Frame Generation reach 450 FPS on an RTX 5090 and 320 FPS on an RTX 5080 at 2560x1440, and 600 FPS on an RTX 5090 at 1920x1080. Treat those as vendor upper bounds rather than expectations — independent measurements land far lower, and in a game where you are timing parries what matters is the base frame rate before frame generation, not the headline number.
The AMD path
FSR 4 and XeSS are both supported with frame generation, but AMD cards do not have the neural ray-reconstruction denoiser, so FSR path tracing is noticeably noisier and loses ember and spark particles in the fidelity presets. The in-game menu does not state which FSR or XeSS version is in use, so it is worth confirming in the graphics options.
One launch-day note
The game ships with the DLSS and Streamline plugins but without the newer neural rendering runtime. Community mods appeared on day one to add DLSS 5 support — those are third-party mods, not part of the stock game, so treat them as optional rather than expected.
The rest of the settings
Upscaling is only one of the levers. Global Illumination, ray tracing, shadows and texture resolution all have a larger effect on frame rate, and matching texture resolution to your VRAM is what stops a stutter appearing late in a fight. The PC performance page has the full settings table with the frame rate cost of each option, and the version history page has the day-one patch these settings assume.