Introduction

Black Myth: Wukong is an action-adventure RPG that plunges players into an expansive, mystical world inspired by ancient Chinese mythology. The game follows the legendary tale of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, as players embark on an epic journey filled with challenging battles, intricate puzzles, and awe-inspiring environments. Set in a fantastical version of ancient China, the game invites players to explore a richly detailed world teeming with mythical creatures, powerful deities, and dark secrets. As Sun Wukong, players will master a diverse array of abilities and transformations, allowing for dynamic combat and strategic gameplay. With a deep narrative rooted in classic folklore, Black Myth: Wukong offers a captivating blend of storytelling, character development, and action that promises an exciting gaming experience.


Black Myth: Wukong is developed by Game Science Studio, a Chinese game developer that's not very well known, at least in the West. This is their first large-scale action RPG and it looks very promising. Built on the powerful Unreal Engine 5, the game showcases stunning visuals and intricate environments that bring the rich, mythological world to life. The game utilizes DirectX 12 to support advanced graphical features and has support for Path Tracing on NVIDIA hardware. Players can choose from various upscaling technologies, including NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, or Unreal Engine 5's native temporal upscaling.

This benchmark review will assess the performance of Black Myth: Wukong across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game's VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at maximum settings, with DLAA. Path tracing and frame generation was disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The "display" settings screen handles all the usual monitor-related settings
• Black Myth Wukong supports "borderless" and "windowed"—there is no support for "fullscreen." You can enable that by editing the ini file and setting the screenmode to "0"
• The FPS limiter can be set to 30, 60, 120 and off
• Supported aspect ratios are 16:9 and 21:9—nothing else. As you can see, our native 16:10 has black bars on top and bottom
• V-Sync can be disabled completely, there is no hidden FPS cap
• An FPS limiter is available with the following steps: 30, 40, 60, 95, 120, 144 FPS
• Motion Blur can be disabled, there's still some blurriness from the various effects, upscaling and depth of field
• You can disable depth of field by editing the engine.ini file and adding [SystemSettings] with an entry r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0

• The "graphics" settings menu has options to select the upscaling technology: AMD FSR, NVIDIA DLSS, Intel XeSS and Unreal Engine's own TSR are supported
• While usually there are upscaler profiles like "quality" and "balanced," in Black Myth Wukong there's only a slider that controls the upscaling. For example, for DLSS, 90..100 = DLAA, 62 .. 89 = Quality, 55 .. 61 = Balanced, 40 .. 54 = Performance, 25 .. 39 = Ultra Performance
• Frame generation from both AMD and NVIDIA is supported
• There's no option to adjust the sharpness, which is generally set very high and is somewhat distracting
• Unreal Engine 5 has its own, shader-based, software ray tracing options that are always enabled.
• If you want, you can enable Path Tracing here, which they just call "NVIDIA Full Ray Tracing". When enabled, lighting, reflections, particles in reflections, caustics and shadows use RT.
• Path Tracing has three quality settings "Low" (Lighting at half resolution, RT shadows), "Medium" (Lighting at half resolution, RT shadows, RT reflections half resolution) and "Very High" (Lighting at full resolution, RT shadows, RT reflections at full resolution + particles, and RT caustics)