Conclusion

Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG developed by the Chinese game studio Game Science, drawing heavy inspiration from the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West and reimagining it with a dark and gritty tone. The game features a single-player experience, with combat mechanics that feel like a blend of Dark Souls and Sekiro, with some God of War sprinkled on top, but with its own unique twists. Gameplay revolves around fast-paced, skill-based combat where precise timing, dodging, and mastery of your abilities are crucial for survival. Throughout the game there are many souls-like elements, some of them on the more annoying side. While some gear progression exists, it's mostly just better x without major choices. The skill tree is pretty big and lets you learn various playstyles. Right now the game is being played by over 2 million people, most of them from China, but no doubt, this is a huge launch, even though the game is definitely not an Elden Ring. There are invisible walls everywhere, exploration is not even close to Elden Ring.

Graphics
Black Myth: Wukong utilizes Unreal Engine 5, delivering some of the most impressive graphics seen in a game to date, though they don't quite reach the heights of Hellblade II: Senua's Saga. The visual fidelity is outstanding, with richly detailed environments full of complex geometry and lush vegetation. The map design is varied and dynamic, featuring few flat surfaces, which adds depth and realism to the world. Textures are top-notch, remaining sharp even when viewed up close, and character models are of very high quality.

Rendering Issues
However, there are some minor issues typical of Unreal Engine, such as a bit of pop-in and occasional texture pop-in. Early in the game, you might experience some stuttering, despite a lengthy "compiling shaders" screen that appears on the first startup or after a driver change. Fortunately, the stuttering is manageable and doesn't detract too much from the overall experience, especially compared to other recent releases, which were much worse. I'm surprised that shader stutter is even an issue in Black Myth: Wukong, even though Unreal Engine 5 provides developers with numerous tools to mitigate such problems.

Effects & Upscalers
While it's possible to disable distracting effects like motion blur, other effects like depth of field can still be intrusive, though they can be turned off with an .ini tweak. The game also forces the use of upscalers, but it offers solid options including NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, and Unreal's own TSR temporal upscaler, which enhances image quality by reconstructing higher resolutions from lower inputs with good results.

The implementation of upscaling in Black Myth: Wukong is a bit unusual and may confuse players. Instead of offering standard upscaler profiles like "Quality," "Balanced," and "Performance" as seen in virtually every other game, the developers opted for a percentage slider. This change deviates from the norm and is likely to bewilder many players who are used to the more straightforward options. Additionally, there's no sharpening control in the game, which is a notable omission. The visuals tend to be oversharpened regardless of the upscaler or settings used, which can detract from the overall visual experience. It's unclear why these design choices were made, but they may frustrate players seeking finer control over their graphics.

Ray Tracing
Black Myth: Wukong leverages Unreal Engine 5's advanced graphics technologies, including Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system, which is a bit like shader-based software ray tracing. Additionally, the game supports "NVIDIA Full Ray Tracing", which we know better as Path Tracing. When enabled, this feature brings a boost to visual fidelity, allowing for improved lighting, reflections, particles within reflections, caustics, and shadows—all rendered with hardware ray tracing—at a big performance hit though. While there are some remarkable differences in still images and when you search for them, I'm not convinced if it's worth the performance hit. I also noticed that the path traced images looks very grainy, a bit like when the denoiser isn't working correctly.

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements of the game are super high, this is the first title that I'm testing where I'm not testing at 100% scaling—it just doesn't make sense—nobody can play the game like that. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p with the 66% scaling, highest settings, no path tracing or frame generation you need a RTX 3090 Ti, RTX 4070 Super or RX 7900 XT—that's still pretty steep! Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4070 Ti, RX 7900 XT and faster. 4K60? That won't be easy—only the mighty GeForce RTX 4090 is able to reach over 60 FPS here, 65.1 FPS to be precise. AMD's fastest the Radeon RX 7900 XTX hits 47 FPS. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a typical open-world area with vegetation, water and enemies. We are testing with the live game as it released today (not the press preview build, not the older benchmark tool). There are some locations that get higher FPS though, but our test scene is not a worst-case either. The game runs fairly similar on NVIDIA and AMD, slightly worse on Intel, but the differences aren't exactly huge compared to where we usually see the tested cards. While NVIDIA and Intel have releases game ready drivers for Black Myth Wukong, AMD drivers are still missing. Yesterday a driver download page was published with claims of game support, but the download link was pointing to last month's 24.7.1 drivers.

Settings Performance Scaling
The performance scaling in Black Myth: Wukong is notably well-implemented, allowing players to roughly triple their FPS by moving from "Cinematic" to "Very Low" settings. While "Very Low" does make the game look quite weak, it's a valuable option for users with older computers—I like that the option exists. The image quality difference between "Very Low" and "Medium" is significant, though the performance impact is reasonably moderate, with only about a 20% difference in FPS. At the high end, the visual improvements between "Very High" and "Cinematic" are minimal, with "Very High" looking almost identical to "Cinematic" except for some subtle shadow details. Enabling path tracing adds extra realism, especially in certain areas where the lighting and shadows become more accurate, though it doesn't drastically change the overall look of the game. Together with upscaling options, it should be possible to achieve decent framerates with any modern graphics card.

VRAM
Our VRAM testing shows that Black Myth Wukong is quite reasonable with its memory requirements, especially when considering the graphics offered. Without Path Tracing / Frame Generation it uses around 8 GB at 4K Ultra, you'll run out of GPU shading power long before VRAM becomes a problem. Enabling upscaling is the same as rendering at lower resolution, which means the VRAM requirements go down accordingly. On the other hand, once you dial the eye candy up, i.e. PT + Frame Generation, you're reaching 13.5 GB at 4K, almost 10 GB at 1080p. The lowest possible details preset uses around 5 GB for all resolutions, which means the game should run pretty well on older cards, too.

Overall, Black Myth: Wukong impresses with solid gameplay, fluid fighting and stunning visuals, though it might be challenging for some players. Like in Elden Ring, I hate that there's no difficulty setting available, which will lead to frustration for casual or inexperienced gamers who would certainly prefer a more accessible experience, like we've seen in some other recent AAA releases. I do enjoy the game and hope that I'll find more time to play, the replay value isn't even close to Elden Ring though.