DRAGON BALL Sparking! ZERO is now available to those who have pre-ordered its Deluxe/Ultimate versions. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 5, and it will be available to everyone on October 11th. We’ve tested this new DB title and we have some good and some bad news for you. And yes. As the title implies, the game suffers from major shader compilation stutters.
For our initial tests and 4K benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and NVIDIA’s RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 565.90 driver. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.
Let’s start with some good news. At Native 4K/Max Settings, the game can easily hit 60fps on PC. In fact, our NVIDIA RTX 4090 was only used at anywhere below 50% at all times. This basically means that the game can hit 60fps at 4K, even on older GPUs like the NVIDIA RTX 3080.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise as DRAGON BALL Sparking! ZERO is a 3D fighting game. Still, it’s good to see another UE5 fighting game (the other one is, obviously, Tekken 8) hitting high framerates with ease.
Now contrary to Tekken 8, DRAGON BALL Sparking! ZERO does not support DLSS, FSR or XeSS. Not only that but the game won’t compile its shaders when you first launch it. As such, you’ll get A LOT of shader compilation stutters. Destroy a mountain and you’ll get a stutter. Make a super move and you’ll get a stutter. Punch your enemy and you’ll get a stutter. Oh, and since the game has a lot of characters, you’ll be constantly getting stutters as different characters have different moves.
Tekken 8 also had this issue in its beta phase. To their credit, though, Bandai Namco and Harada-san acknowledged and fixed it prior to the game’s official release.
At the end of the article, you can find a video we captured. What’s funny is that you don’t even have to pay attention to the frametime graph. You can spot the stutters as they happen. They are THAT obvious. And, as you’ll see, there are a lot of them. And that’s a bummer as this is a fast-paced fighting game.
I seriously don’t know why the devs have not added a pre-compilation shader step. I mean, I get it. The PC version is most likely an afterthought. That’s pretty obvious from the limited PC graphics settings. But the whole gaming experience on PC, especially at the beginning, is awful. This is a stutter-fest. At least we do have Keyboard & Mouse inputs, so that’s something.
Since this is a fighting game, we won’t have a PC Performance Analysis. As I said, the game can easily hit 60fps at 4K. So, most of you won’t encounter any major performance issues. Well, apart from the stutters.
Let’s hope that Spike Chunsoft will do something about them via a post-launch update!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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