Phantom Blade Zero Shows Off Path Tracing and DLSS 4.5 in New Video
Developer S-Game has released a new promotional video for Phantom Blade Zero (影之刃零), showcasing the game’s full suite of RTX rendering features on PC. The footage compares three rendering modes side by side: rasterization, standard ray tracing, and full path tracing. According to the announcement, the video offers a complete look at how the PC version’s RTX technology stack performs in practice. Phantom Blade Zero is an Unreal Engine 5 action title that blends Chinese wuxia, cold-weapon duels, and eerie fantasy elements, and it is already available on PS5 and PC platforms.
Once path tracing is enabled, the game performs unified global illumination calculation. According to the announcement, light bounces between objects, color bleeding, water caustics, and environmental shadows are all rendered more realistically, while locations such as old villages, dense forest valleys, and rain-soaked nighttime battlefields gain noticeably stronger atmosphere. To experience the full effect, players need an RTX-series graphics card along with the corresponding Game Ready driver, after which the relevant options can be enabled in the settings menu. The same video serves as a comparison of the three rendering approaches.
Because path tracing places a heavy load on hardware, the game ships with full DLSS 4.5 support, which includes ray reconstruction and dynamic multi-frame generation. These AI-driven features compensate for the performance cost, aiming to preserve high-quality path-traced visuals while maintaining smooth frame rates and drawing more out of RTX GPUs. The announcement also notes that path tracing is a PC-exclusive feature, and the PS5 version does not support it. No further details on console-side rendering options were provided.
Phantom Blade Zero follows Soul (魂), a swordsman whose heart has been gravely wounded, leaving him only 66 days to live. Bearing a false accusation, he flees through a lawless, collapsing martial world while investigating and dismantling a conspiracy engulfing the jianghu. Since launch, the game’s concurrent player peaks on PC have repeatedly hit new highs, and player reviews have surpassed 400,000, with the positive rating climbing from 88% to 91% as of publication. The technical showcase is impressive, though the path-tracing advantage remains reserved for PC players with RTX hardware.
