Introduction

Black Myth: Wukong is now available on PC and PlayStation 5, it's an action RPG, similar to Dark Souls and Sekiro.



This popular new game is developed using a heavily modified version of Unreal Engine 5, incorporating several cutting-edge technologies which include:

• Nanite virtualized geometry
• Lumen, an advanced lighting system for global illumination and reflections
• Niagara VFX system
• Chaos Physics for realistic simulation of clothes, chains, hair, and belts

The PC version supports several advanced features from day one:

• NVIDIA's DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation (DLSS 3)
• NVIDIA's Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA)
• Intel's Xe Super Sampling 1.3 (XeSS 1.3)
• AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) upscaling and Frame Generation

Black Myth: Wukong is also one of the first Unreal Engine 5 games to support Full Ray Tracing (also known as Path Tracing), which includes:

• Full resolution ReSTIR GI
• Full resolution Ray Traced Reflections
• Full resolution Ray Traced Particles
• Fully Ray Traced Shadows
• Fully Ray Traced Caustics

In terms of upscaling implementation, the game doesn't have the standard Quality, Balanced, or Performance presets for all available upscaling solutions. Instead, players adjust the render scaling ratio in the game settings, which ranges from 25% to 100% across all resolutions. The game also features Unreal Engine 5's Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) for native resolution instead of a standard TAA solution, with the ability to upscale. In our tests, we used the following settings for upscaling:

• Quality mode at 67%
• Balanced mode at 58%
• Performance mode at 50%

To run Black Myth: Wukong at maximum graphics settings and reasonable framerates at native resolution, a powerful GPU is necessary. Therefore, upscaling solutions are crucial. Different games have varying implementations of NVIDIA's DLSS, Intel's XeSS, AMD's FSR, and UE5's TSR. We are excited to examine how these temporal upscalers perform in Black Myth: Wukong.

Below, you'll find comparison screenshots at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p resolutions, showcasing different quality modes for XeSS, FSR, and DLSS. Screenshots for TSR, DLAA, and DLSS/FSR Frame Generation are also available in the dropdown menu. For a dynamic view of these technologies in motion, watch our side-by-side comparison video. This video reveals issues such as shimmering or temporal instability that might not be evident in still images.

All tests were conducted using a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU at Cinematic graphics settings with Path Tracing enabled and motion blur disabled. We also used a Radeon RX 7900 XT for additional testing. The game features DLSS Super Resolution version 3.1.30 and DLSS Frame Generation version 3.6.0.

Screenshots

Side-by-Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

Black Myth: Wukong relies heavily on upscaling technologies, which are enabled by default when you first launch the game. This makes sense, as the game produces very impressive—yet demanding—visuals with Unreal Engine 5, especially with Path Tracing enabled. Without upscaling the game runs at relatively low FPS, even on high-end hardware. However, there are several fundamental errors and questionable design choices that we wanted to point out when it comes to how upscaling solutions are implemented in this game.

The most noticeable issue is the absence of any control over the sharpening filter. Usually it's not that big of a deal, but in this game, the developers have set the sharpening filter to a very high value for all available upscaling and antialiasing solutions, making the image look rather oversharpened, even at 4K. This excessive over-sharpening even creates various image quality artifacts, such as pixelation and shimmering of vegetation, and around in-game characters during cutscenes, mainly on their hair and fur, when heavy depth of field effects are engaged in the scene. This is exacerbated by the fact that depth of field also cannot be disabled from within the settings. You can only turn this setting off by manually editing the engine.ini file and adding [SystemSettings] with an entry r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0.

The second most noticeable issue is how the Super Resolution slider (internal resolution scaling for upscaling) is implemented. Usually we are happy to see a resolution scaling slider for upscaling in addition to the standard quality levels—like how it was handled in Starfield, for example—as it gives more experienced players better options to configure their performance and image quality. However, the slider does not work correctly, specifically with DLSS. When DLSS is enabled, changing the resolution scaling outside the standard quality levels (67%, 58%, 50% and 33%) does not have any effect, meaning you cannot apply the internal resolution for DLSS upscaling to values other than the standard quality levels. Also, there is a rare bug that applies Ultra Performance mode to the image if the resolution scaling is set to a value outside the standard quality levels, for example 78%. These issues are related to DLSS only, as FSR, XeSS and TSR all appear to have correct scaling at any resolution scaling value. The game also automatically changes the resolution scaling values without any notice when swapping between different output resolutions. For example, changing the output resolution from 1440p to 4K will automatically set the internal resolution to Ultra Performance mode (33% of resolution) even if it was set to 100% before that, which is very confusing because the game does not inform you of this automatic change.

Speaking of overall image quality with upscaling enabled, all upscaling solutions in Black Myth: Wukong have their own issues:

• The DLSS Super Resolution implementation at 1080p and 1440p has noticeable shimmering on vegetation and especially tree leaves, and unfortunately it is visible even when standing still. Perhaps using a newer version of DLSS, e.g. version 3.7, rather than 3.1, would fix this. Regarding other aspects of the overall image quality, the image is pretty stable during fast motion. It is free of any ghosting artifacts and particle effects—of which this game has many—are rendered completely, and without any visible breakups or pixelation in motion. Enabling DLAA will noticeably reduce the shimmering in vegetation, and in conjunction with DLSS Frame Generation, will produce the most stable image quality while offering similar performance gains as DLSS in Quality mode.
• The XeSS 1.3 implementation in its DP4a mode has even more shimmering on vegetation and tree leaves to a point that it might be very distracting for some people during actual gameplay. Also, the shimmering and flickering artifacts are visible not only at 1080p and 1440p resolutions, but at 4K XeSS Quality mode as well. On a positive note, the XeSS image is free of ghosting or disocclusion artifacts, similarly to the DLSS image.
• Surprisingly, the FSR 3 implementation has the most stable image in terms of shimmering in moving vegetation, however, the overall image is suffering from excessive ghosting, pixelation in motion and heavy disocclusion artifacts. Every swing of the players weapon or any fast movement of your character in general is followed by very visible pixelation, ghosting and smearing artifacts, which is very distracting, especially during intense boss fights. The FSR 3 image also has a degraded quality of particle effects, especially visible on fire, waterfalls and water effects in general. As this game is not using the 3.1 version of FSR, enabling FSR 3 Frame Generation with FSR upscaling will exaggerate the ghosting and pixelation artifacts to be even more visible during gameplay. To alleviate any concerns over the GPU hardware used, we tested FSR 3 upscaling and Frame Generation using not only a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, but also a Radeon RX 7900 XT, to see how FSR 3 upscaling and Frame Generation would perform on different GPU architectures—the results were identical.
• The TSR implementation also fails to reconstruct the details in vegetation rendering, but in a very different style compared to other upscaling solutions. The TSR upscaling algorithm simply can not render the vegetation properly, producing not only a shimmery output, but the image also has significant flickering, with big chunks of very visible black pixels in vegetation, especially on tree leaves in the distance, that flicker even when standing still. These artifacts are visible the most at 1080p and 1440p resolutions. Also, the ghosting artifacts around the main character are present, but to a lesser degree compared to the FSR 3 image.

Regarding performance, the DLSS, XeSS 1.3, and FSR 3 implementations provide a solid 45% performance boost in "Quality" mode at 4K, around 40% at 1440p and around 35% at 1080p compared to native rendering. With DLSS Super Resolution or FSR 3 in "Quality" mode and DLSS/FSR Frame Generation enabled, you can expect almost tripled FPS at 4K and 1440p resolutions and slightly more than doubled FPS at 1080p resolution compared to native rendering. The native FSR 3 and XeSS performance is similar to the native TSR solution, and the DLAA solution runs slightly faster than TSR, FSR 3 and XeSS at native, while at the same time offering the best graphical experience overall. DLAA can also be combined with DLSS Frame Generation for a better than native image quality and FPS.