Black Myth Wukong PC Benchmark Tool Is Now Available: Includes Ray Tracing & DLSS/FSR/XeSS Support

The PC Benchmark tool for the highly anticipated AAA title, Black Myth Wukong, is now available for download at Steam.

Developed by Chinese studio, Game Science, Black Myth Wukong is a brand new IP with a focus on Action RPG mechanics. The game is based around the Chinese novel, Journey to The West and will put you in control of the "Destined One" who will roam around the mythical land, fighting off very unique enemies.

The game went gold last week and was followed by an impressive trailer which gives us a taste of the amazing visuals that this game is going to offer. On a technical side, Black Myth Wukong will be very demanding based on its system requirements which require up to an RTX 4070 and RX 7800 XT for Ultra quality without ray tracing. To maximize the RT quality, you'll need a beefier GPU such as the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER or above. The CPU requirements are nominal with the developer's recommended 6 and 8-core chips from AMD & Intel (9th Gen / Ryzen 5000).

As for the graphics settings, Black Myth Wukong has the basic display configuration panel which lets you change the resolution, display mode, aspect ratio, framerate-cap, V-Sync, and Motion Blur. The Graphics Settings offers more detailed customization which has the "Recommended Graphics Settings" apply option at the very top followed by options to configure Super Resolution.

The game supports all three Super Resolution technologies from NVIDIA, AMD & Intel including DLSS, FSR, and XeSS. There's a fourth "TSR" (Temporal Super Resolution) option too. Frame Generation can be used with DLSS, FSR and TSR but it looks like NVIDIA cards don't support FSR Frame-Gen at the moment DLSS Frame-Gen works fine.

The Super Resolution quality can be set via a slider. A 100% slider means that sampling is applied to the native resolution which is essentially DLAA/FSR AA/XeSS AA while moving the slider down shows the preset respective to the percentage (Quality/Balanced/Performance/Ultra Performance). The Ray Tracing options apply only to NVIDIA GPUs and are listed as "NVIDIA Full Ray Tracing" since NVIDIA's cards will be able to run them the best. The "Very High" RT settings enables path-tracing which makes sense for NVIDIA GPUs owing to their better RT hardware capabilities.

When enabled, you have the option to select from Low, Medium, and Very High. The rest are the standard quality settings which state "Cinematic" for the best quality. Users can adjust various settings manually such as View Distance, Anti-Aliasing, Post-processing Effects, Shadows, Textures, Visual Effects, Hair, Vegetation, Global Illumination & Reflections.

The tool also has a pre-shader compilation process which 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 its best to use the "Intel Baseline" profiles or just underclock or undervolt your chips manually and let the process finish. The loading time is small since only the assets of the benchmark are being compiled and not the entire game.

Coming to the performance numbers, we first used the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU running on an Intel Core i9-13900K (Baseline Profile) with DDR5-6800 memory. We maxed out everything including the RT quality and tested the game at 4K with DLAA (Frame Generation) and DLSS (75% Frame Generation). With DLAA, the GPU scores 44 FPS and with DLSS at Quality, the GPU scored 74 FPS. Without Frame-Gen, the FPS drops to 23 FPS with DLAA and 41 FPS with DLSS Quality.

4K DLAA (Maxed Out Quality/RT) With Frame-Gen on RTX 4090:

4K DLSS 75% (Maxed Out 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, it looks like Black Myth Wukong is a very GPU-intensive title since you need frame generation even with DLSS Quality mode to achieve over 60 FPS on high-end cards such as the RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 SUPER. The rest of the cards will be better off at lower resolutions such as 1440p for the RTX 4070 series and 1080p for the RTX 4060 series. We'll soon be testing the Radeon RX 7000 cards too to confirm how the performance on RDNA 3 compares.

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 rolls out on the 20th of August with optimized drivers from NVIDIA, AMD & Intel. Keep following for more on Black Myth Wukong. The game is also bundled with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 GPUs as we reported last month.