Phantom Blade Zero Steam Deck performance was the first thing I wanted to check once S-GAME’s Wuxia action RPG landed on 28 October, and it’s already been setting records as one of the most-played single-player games on Steam this year. The short answer: it is playable on the Deck, but whether it’s enjoyable depends on how much tweaking you’re willing to do. Out of the box it’s rough, and with the right upscaler and frame generation combination it becomes something I’d actually sit down and play.
Built on Unreal Engine 5, the game puts you in the role of Soul, a warrior with only sixty-six days left to live, fighting off assassins and unravelling a world-ending conspiracy. It’s a demanding game on PC too: Steam lists a GTX 1660 or RX 5500 XT as the minimum, aiming for 1080p at 30fps with upscaling, plus a hefty 145GB of storage. So the Deck was always going to need some help.
Minimum settings on Steam Deck
I started at the absolute minimum settings, with one important tweak. TSR looks noticeably better here than the other upscaling options, which leave the image jagged and flickering, so I set Dynamic Resolution off, TSR on Balanced and the super resolution output scale to 90%.
This will not hold a stable 30fps. Watch the FPS counter and you’ll see it dipping into the 20s quite regularly. The strange part is that it doesn’t feel like it in play. Even with those dips, it feels closer to a 30fps experience than the numbers suggest. What you do notice is the image quality: the shading around Soul and the TSR effect get much grainier as the frame rate drops. Overall, though, the actual playability is pretty decent, and that gives us a good base to build on.
Best Phantom Blade Zero Steam Deck performance: HelixSR and HLX DLSS
The real improvement comes from the Decky plugin route with my own MultiFrameGen plugin. The HelixSR plus MAKO combination is the best setup I’ve found for a lot of games right now, and Phantom Blade Zero is no exception. There is one catch: HelixSR throws an error once you get into the game. To fix it, bind the Insert key to one of the Deck’s back buttons and set FSR in the game’s own settings. Then press that bound button to open the HelixSR menu and change the upscaler.
The HLX DLSS option is the smoothest and best looking of the bunch here, so set that at the top of the menu and the error goes away. The difference is immediate. It looks a little washed out in the rain effects, but the character detail is far cleaner than TSR or anything else the in-game settings can give you. If you want more background on what this kind of DLSS-style upscaling on the Steam Deck can do, I’ve covered it before. On its own, though, it doesn’t do much for the frame rate.
Adding MAKO 2x frame generation
That’s where MAKO comes in. Frame generation usually adds a fair amount of input latency, but, much like the base performance, this game seems to handle it far better than you’d expect. I set frame generation to 2x. If you’d rather not use MAKO, HelixSR’s built-in frame generation is an option too, although you’ll need to restart the game again after switching it on.
It won’t hold 60fps, especially once the combat kicks off, but it gives a much better 40 to 50fps throughout. I didn’t really notice any extra input latency, and it’s genuinely pretty decent to play this way. Overall, I’m quite impressed that this combination makes Phantom Blade Zero properly playable on the Steam Deck.
Steam Deck rating and future patches
Valve hasn’t given the game a Steam Deck rating yet, and given how hard it pushes the hardware, I don’t expect a Verified or Playable badge any time soon. On the plus side, ProtonDB players currently rate it Platinum, and it has full controller support, so compatibility isn’t the problem. Raw performance is. With the kind of popularity it’s seeing, I can certainly imagine patches arriving that improve things, so it’s worth keeping an eye on updates.
GeForce NOW: ultra settings on the Deck
If you don’t want to wait for patches or make any compromises with upscalers, there is one other option. Phantom Blade Zero was added to GeForce NOW on day one, so with a decent internet connection and a few extra pounds a month you can run it at full ultra settings at 1200p directly on the Steam Deck. It’s one of several big releases on the service right now, as I covered in this week’s GeForce NOW Steam Deck roundup.
I’d actually recommend dropping the stream to 800p, as 1200p overloaded my Deck a little when I pushed it. I also set DLSS Ultra in-game to see if that helped. Some jitter I saw was down to the Deck needing a reboot rather than the stream itself, as the ping stayed extremely stable with a 90fps stream and a solid in-game frame rate. Running at those ultra settings, this is an absolutely gorgeous game.
Is Phantom Blade Zero worth playing on Steam Deck?
There are several ways to play Phantom Blade Zero on Steam Deck. Natively with TSR, it’s playable if you can live with a grainy image and dips into the 20s. With HelixSR’s HLX DLSS upscaler and 2x frame generation, it climbs to 40 to 50fps and feels genuinely good to play. And if you want it at its best, GeForce NOW delivers the full ultra experience. It’s £49.99 on Steam, or you can grab it for less from Instant Gaming.
