Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is a phenomenal package. A flagship DB fighting game with almost 200 characters and oodles upon oodles of gameplay? You bet! As soon as we started the game up, though, the thing that came to mind was that Sparking Zero was a perfect match for the Steam Deck.

And so, it didn't take long for us to test it out on the handheld. On this front, we've got news both good and bad, and it's surprisingly going to take a bit of elbow grease to really get Sparking Zero to work well on the Steam Deck.

Get your Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero Steam key right here!

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero Steam Deck Performance & Gameplay

The Steam Deck is a delightful piece of hardware: even if you can't get a stable 60 FPS out of a game, the Deck lets you fine-tune its display's refresh rate to hit the lowest stable frame rate you can achieve in a game. This, in turn, results in stable gameplay and a satisfying playing experience even if you can only reach 40, 45, or even just 30 FPS in a game!

Problem we have here is that not only does Dragon Ball Sparking Zero have trouble staying at 60 FPS on the Steam Deck, but it's also hard-coded to slow down if your FPS drops. In practice, this means that no matter how low you drop your in-game settings on the deck, the game will always have major FPS drops and straight-up play in slow-motion. Capping your FPS/Hz to a lower rate simply makes it so that the game runs in a permanent slow-motion, which is a pain.

The "good news" bit is that you can fix this! Thanks to a helpful engine tweak spotted by SteamDeckHQ, you can make it so that Sparking Zero's new game logic target is either 40 or 45 FPS, and the Deck is powerful enough to maintain a stable framerate at this stage. Here's how to do it!

• Go to Steam Deck's Desktop Mode
• Find the Engine.ini file of your Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero installation (/home/deck/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/1790600/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/AppData/Local/SparkingZERO/Saved/Config/Windows/)
• Open Engine. ini and paste the following code at the bottom of the document:
  • [/script/engine.engine]
  • FixedFrameRate=40
  • [SystemSettings]
  • bUseFixedFrameRate=True
  • bSmoothFrameRate=False
  • FixedFrameRate=40
  • FrameRateLimit=40
• Save Engine.ini and close the file.

You can replace any instance of '40' with '45' to lock the game to 45 FPS instead of 40, if that's your preference. Our recommendation is to then drop the in-game graphics settings to Medium or thereabouts, and to leave the TDP cap off. Any FPS drops you may get will then be fairly minor and extremely infrequent.

It's not a great solution, and it would've been nice if Bandai Namco didn't hard-cap the game logic to FPS, but at least we have a fairly easy way of tweaking it, right?

Get your Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero Steam key right here!