Over 1.7 Million Gamers Playing Black Myth: Wukong, But No Game Ready Drivers Available

[btarunr]

Black Myth: Wukong is seeing a thunderous worldwide opening today (August 20). Steam Charts by SteamDB, a service that tracks and aggregates public information on concurrent players for games on Steam, measured over 1.73 million concurrent players for the game on Steam, breaking a previous record held by Valve's homebrew Dota 2. Steam is only one of three other platforms the game released in, with the others being Epic Games Store, and Xbox Series X/S, so the actual concurrent player count could only be higher. The action fantasy RPG is based on the 16h century Chinese epic "Journey to the West," and introduces a richly detailed ancient China. The game is known to also introduce several new combat mechanics.

Even as close to 2 million people are discovering the game, neither NVIDIA nor AMD have put out optimized drivers for the game as of this writing. Intel released the Arc 101.5971 Beta drivers with optimization for the game as of August 19. While AMD has put up a driver page for Adrenalin 24.8.1 WHQL, the download link on that page goes to the previous month's driver. Looks like someone failed at copy and paste.

Update 12:41 UTC: NVIDIA has released Game Ready Drivers



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[Daven]

Note to tech press: we don’t need permission to play a game, drivers or not.

 

[Vincero]

Well, it's using Unreal engine 5 right? So what optimisation is this going to need that Hellblade 2, Robocop, and the various other games and tech demos that have been out for UE5 for a while wouldn't have benefitted from?

At some point there's either a bug in the drivers or the game engine / coding... I expect it's not up to the driver makers to fix the game and vice versa.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Well, it's using Unreal engine 5 right? So what optimisation is this going to need that Hellblade 2, Robocop, and the various other games and tech demos that have been out for UE5 for a while wouldn't have benefitted from?

At some point there's either a bug in the drivers or the game engine / coding... I expect it's not up to the driver makers to fix the game and vice versa.

You haven't been around long, eh? Game-specific fixes have been a common sight in video drivers for over 20 years.

Also, just because they are made on the same game engine, does NOT mean they use the same optimization. Not even close.

 

[samum]

 

[napata]

Well, it's using Unreal engine 5 right? So what optimisation is this going to need that Hellblade 2, Robocop, and the various other games and tech demos that have been out for UE5 for a while wouldn't have benefitted from?

At some point there's either a bug in the drivers or the game engine / coding... I expect it's not up to the driver makers to fix the game and vice versa.

I had a lot of stutter in Still Wakes the Deep, another UE5 games, until I remembered I was on pretty old drivers. I thought it was just a typical case of UE PSO or traversal stutter because that's how the stutter behaved but after I updated drivers it was gone.

 

[Philaphlous]

WTH is Banana??? I had to look it up... people will play anything...

 

[Chomiq]

Question is - who cares? Optimized drivers are usually the sign that game needs some specific driver level optimizations to run best. Doesn't mean you can't play the game without game optimized driver (at least most of the time).

And yeah, if OP is the same person that posted on the same day about AMD optimized drivers being released I dunno what's the editorial process here:

 

[W1zzard]

Question is - who cares? Optimized drivers are usually the sign that game needs some specific driver level optimizations to run best. Doesn't mean you can't play the game without game optimized driver (at least most of the time).

And yeah, if OP is the same person that posted on the same day about AMD optimized drivers being released I dunno what's the editorial process here:
View attachment 359784

the download link from AMD for the new driver goes to 24.7.1, last month's driver

https://www.amd.com/de/resources/support-articles/release-notes/RN-RAD-WIN-24-8-1.html

Hover over the download link, it says whql-amd-software-adrenalin-edition-24.7.1-win10-win11-july19-rdna.exe

And yeah, if OP is the same person that posted on the same day about AMD optimized drivers being released I dunno what's the editorial process here:

l2read

 

[ViperXZ]

The new driver of AMD isn’t officially available if you try to find it in the download section only the past driver will show up. I guess they unpublished it because there was a problem with the new game Wukong, as some people have written in Reddit, but it will at least be something similar, a critical problem.

 

[Vincero]

You haven't been around long, eh? Game-specific fixes have been a common sight in video drivers for over 20 years.

Also, just because they are made on the same game engine, does NOT mean they use the same optimization. Not even close.

No, I've been around a while, and yes I am aware of this and it still amazes me we have this common cycle.
If we assume at some point that AMD/Nvidia tweak their drivers as best as possible to leverage the best performance from their cards for the DirectX/Vulkan/OpenGL APIs, the reality is these 'game optimisations' essentially patch over p!ss poor optimisation of the games use of the API itself, or more likely bypass/rework the operation of some part of the software/GPU hardware pipeline that doesn't suit a particular game as well.
It may just be that the new driver better recognises the UE5 engine in use and applies previously developed optimisations - who knows...

Yes I'm aware that the programmable shader architecture allows for a huge amount of potential optimisation in many different ways, and if there is a patch which fixes a defficiency exposed by a new game then great that they fixed the f***-up, but I don't see new CPU microcode being pushed out to re-optimise the ALU/FPU operations on existing products to squeeze a few more FPS out of games.

Whilst I acknowledge there will be some game developers that will work hard to work as best as possible within the API frameworks and get the best out of the standard driver releases out there - indeed indie game developers are gonna pretty much be on their own - some really do not and it would be interesting if the 'optimisations' that the drivers implement was actually explained. Otherwise as shown by people in this thread already, the game already worked (maybe there is a bug that hasn't presented itself for those), so in reality any optimisation is either short-cutting something or messing with the operation of the game in some way.

I get that this is probably coming across as a bit of a moaning old man - I just think that the worlds leading tech companies shouldn't be in a position where this needs to happen. Call me crazy but I'd rather newer drivers be mostly bug fixes for actual bugs and not "oh we figured out that for this game if we turn off this bit of the pixel pipeline things are quicker and 99% of you won't see a visual difference" crap.

 

[redeye]

the download link from AMD for the new driver goes to 24.7.1, last month's driver

https://www.amd.com/de/resources/support-articles/release-notes/RN-RAD-WIN-24-8-1.html

Hover over the download link, it says whql-amd-software-adrenalin-edition-24.7.1-win10-win11-july19-rdna.exe


l2read

i will say it. (W1zzard is polite) learn to read. RTFA. (to the poster, not W1zzard!)

 

[colossusrageblack]

I'm only about 45 minutes into the game. Really wondering what kind of improvement I'll get on my desktop. AMD also released drivers, so I'll be updating the Legion Go's drivers too to see what kind of performance gains there are, if any.

 

[ViperXZ]

If we assume at some point that AMD/Nvidia tweak their drivers

You assume wrong. This is about lazy devs being inconsistent and essentially the bigger companies with more money (AMD / Nvidia) make up for their mistakes and suboptimal programming by optimising their drivers as good as possible to counter it. Depending on how bad or good the game is programmed this only goes so far and the game remains suboptimal with the usage of resources like GPUs etc.

 

[TomWeng]

_________, but at what cost? ：笑：