Dragon Ball FighterZ PC Performance Review

Conclusion

What Arc System Works aimed to create with Dragon Ball FighterZ is a competitive fighting game that holds true to its source material. What they delivered is one of the prettiest Dragon Ball game ever produced and the first fighting game from the franchise to ever be considered viable for competitive play. 

Graphically FighterZ is extremely impressive, offering visuals that closely match what can be seen in both the Anime and Manga, offering authentic poses, attacks and animations to the real deal. The attention to detail here is breathtaking, with animations that often surpass the sources that they are based on. 

While Dragon Ball FighterZ is a visual masterpiece, it is not something that we would call demanding. Visuals don’t get better because you can throw more powerful hardware at it and this game shows that a clear vision and specific style can offer some compelling visual results.

Moving into our GPU testing, it quickly became clear that Dragon Ball FighterZ is exceptionally easy to run, easily running at max settings on our ageing GTX 960 and R9 380 graphics cards at a resolution of 1440p. Only those with an extremely low-end system to have trouble running this game. If you are confident in calling your Rig a gaming PC, you will almost undoubtedly be able to run this game. 

On the CPU side, we can again confirm that this title is almost too easy to run at the game’s desired 60FPS framerate, with even our dual-core simulation running the game without any framerate drops. AMD Ryzen or Intel? Who cares, this game perfectly on both, even after we decided to downclock out systems. Even a low-class CPU warrior can take on the elites in FighterZ. 

The only thing that some players will nitpick with FighterZ is the title’s 60FPS lock, though the reasoning behind this becomes clear when you consider FighterZ as a competitive fighting game. In competitive fighting titles, visual information is vital, with animation frames and their timings being key for counters and other aspects of high-level play. A fixed framerate and fixed animations ensure that critical information is always shown, making the game fair for all players.   

FighterZ is designed to run at 60FPS, no more and no less, even on consoles. When the framerate dips on PC so does the game’s simulation speed, resulting in slow-motion gameplay. This slowdown even affects online play, resulting in players getting disconnected/kicked from matches if their framerate is too low. 

Beyond that, not all animations in the game run at 60FPS, with some using lower refresh rates to make your movements more apparent to opponents, while this may make the game seem jerky in places, map scrolling and most other visuals are played at 60FPS, making the game appear smooth.   

What Dragon Ball FighterZ offers is an in-depth fighting system that is a joy to master and a PC version that can run with ease on both new and old hardware alike. Controls can be mapped to a keyboard if the user wishes but I recommend using a gamepad for this title, beyond that there is very little to complain about here. 

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