Includes ray tracing and DLSS/FSR/XeSS support.

PC Benchmark Tool for the Highly Anticipated AAA Game, Black Myth Wukong, Now available for download on Steam..

Fire up your devices, it’s time for benchmarks! Black Myth Wukong PC Performance Test Tool Release

Developed by Chinese studio Game Science, Black Myth Wukong is a new game that focuses on action-packed RPG mechanics. Based on the Chinese novel Journey to The West, the game will put you in control of a “destined destiny” who will wander the mythical land and fight very unique enemies.

The game was a huge success last week, and was followed by an impressive trailer that gives us a glimpse of the stunning visuals that this game will offer. Technically, Black Myth Wukong will be very demanding based on its system requirements that require up to an RTX 4070 and RX 7800 XT at Ultra quality without ray tracing. To achieve maximum RT quality, you will need a more powerful GPU like the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER or higher. CPU requirements are nominal with the developer-recommended 6- and 8-core chips from AMD and Intel (9th Gen / Ryzen 5000).

As for graphics settings, Black Myth Wukong has a basic display configuration panel that lets you change the resolution, display mode, aspect ratio, frame rate, vertical image sync, and motion blur. Graphics settings offer more detailed customization with the “Recommended Graphics Settings” option applied at the top followed by options to configure ultra-high resolution.

The game supports all three super-resolution technologies from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel including DLSS, FSR, and XeSS. There is also a “TSR” (temporary super-resolution) option. Frame Generation can be used with DLSS, FSR, and TSR but it seems that NVIDIA cards do not support FSR’s Frame-Gen at the moment. DLSS Frame-Gen works fine.

The quality of the Ultra Resolution can be adjusted via a slider. A slider of 100% means that the sampling is applied to the native resolution which is basically DLAA/FSR AA/XeSS AA while moving the slider down shows the percentage-related preset (Quality/Balance/Performance/Ultra Performance). The Ray Tracing options only apply to NVIDIA GPUs and are listed as “NVIDIA Full Ray Tracing” since NVIDIA cards will be able to run it best. The “Very High” RT settings allow for path tracing which makes sense for NVIDIA GPUs given their superior capabilities in RT hardware.

When this feature is enabled, you have the option to choose from Low, Medium, and Very High. The rest of the settings are the standard quality settings with Cinematic being the best quality. Users can manually adjust various settings such as View Distance, Anti-Aliasing, Post-Processing Effects, Shadows, Textures, Visual Effects, Hair, Plants, Global Lighting, and Reflections.

The tool also has a pre-compilation process for the shadows that takes around 1-2 minutes to complete. Since this is an Unreal Engine 5 title, we can expect many Intel users to experience crashes while going through this process and it is best to use the “Intel Baseline” profiles or manually underclock the processor and let the process finish. The loading time is small since only the benchmark assets are being compiled and not the entire game.

For performance numbers, we first used an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU running on an Intel Core i9-13900K (base profile) with DDR5-6800 memory. We maxed out everything including RT quality and tested the game at 4K resolution with DLAA (frame generation) and DLSS (75% frame generation). With DLAA, the GPU recorded 44fps and with DLSS at quality, the GPU recorded 74fps. Without Frame-Gen, the FPS drops to 23fps with DLAA and 41fps with DLSS quality.

4K DLAA (Maximum Quality/RT) with Frame-Gen on RTX 4090:

4K DLSS 75% (Max Quality/RT) with Frame-Gen on RTX 4090:

We also ran tests on some other GPUs which you can see below:

Looking at the performance numbers, Black Myth Wukong seems to be a very GPU-intensive game as you need to generate frames even with DLSS quality mode to achieve over 60 FPS on high-end cards like the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 SUPER. The rest of the cards will be better at lower resolutions like 1440p for the RTX 4070 series and 1080p for the RTX 4060 series. We will be testing the Radeon RX 7000 cards soon as well to confirm how performance compares on RDNA 3.

Note: The following video is still being processed by YouTube.

The graphics in the benchmark tool look great but we can expect slightly better performance when the game officially launches on August 20 with improved drivers from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel. Stay tuned for more on Black Myth Wukong. The game also comes with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 GPUs as we reported last month.