Black Myth: Wukong is a new action RPG that’s gained attention for its stunning visuals and intense combat. Today, we’ll focus on GPU benchmarking to compare performance.
Black Myth: Wukong is a new action RPG that draws deep inspiration from Chinese mythology. The game invites players to embark on an epic journey as the Destined One, navigating through awe-inspiring landscapes and uncovering hidden truths from ancient legends. The game has garnered attention ahead of release for its stunning visuals (Unreal Engine 5), intense combat, and rich worldbuilding.
That’s as far as we will go in terms of gameplay details because today’s article is all about GPU benchmark testing. The ultimate goal is to benchmark a stupid number of graphics cards under the same test conditions to see how they compare in terms of performance. This will allow you to see how much faster a potential upgrade is compared to your current setup.
Black Myth: Wukong also offers a free benchmark tool available on Steam, which is excellent. We wish all game developers would offer such a tool. After a 7GB download, you can run the benchmark on your system. This will help you determine how well your current setup plays the game. If you need a GPU upgrade, this guide will show you how much more performance you can get out of current-generation GPUs, as well as most models from the previous generation.
Wukong is powered by Unreal Engine and looks incredible. It is an Nvidia-sponsored title, so there is a heavy emphasis on ray tracing, though FSR and XeSS upscaling are supported alongside DLSS. Frame generation is also available for both FSR and DLSS, along with TSR.
For benchmarking, we’re testing five different configurations, each at three resolutions, with up to 41 GPUs, resulting in a huge amount of data. We’ve already logged over 40 hours in the benchmark tool across two systems, both using the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, and they have been calibrated to deliver consistent results.
We have two ray tracing configurations for you. One uses the cinematic preset with upscaling set to 75%, frame generation enabled, and very high ray tracing. We’ve used DLSS for the GeForce 40 series and FSR for everything else, as that allows us to enable frame generation. The other configuration uses all the same settings, except ray tracing has been dialed down one notch to medium.
For those wondering, there are three ray tracing options: low, medium, and very high. We’ve created a table to show what each option does, and we will be testing the very high and medium options. In addition, we have three native configurations that don’t use upscaling, frame generation, or ray tracing, though we are using FSR at 100% for the Radeon GPUs and DLSS at 100% for the GeForce GPUs. The presets used here include cinematic, high, and medium.
Finally, for testing the GeForce GPUs, we’re using Game Ready Driver 560.87, and for the Radeon GPUs, Adrenalin Edition 24.7.1. AMD has yet to release a dedicated driver for this title, but we won’t wait, as there is no telling when that will happen. We’ve also included the Intel Arc A770 and A750, though they were only benchmarked in the medium and high presets as performance using the current driver was not great. Now, let’s dive into the data…
We’ll begin with the results at very high ray tracing quality, which uses the cinematic preset with 75% upscaling and frame generation enabled. It’s important to note that the actual frame rate is much lower than what’s being reported here due to the use of frame generation. As we’ve seen before, anything below 60 fps with frame generation enabled results in a poor experience, which makes sense. Ideally, you want a base frame rate of 60 fps, which translates to roughly 100 fps on this graph.
Given that, at 1080p, the game is extremely challenging to play under these conditions. The RTX 4090 is the only GPU capable of delivering smooth performance, with the equivalent of 141 fps. Again, it’s crucial to emphasize that these figures include frame-generated frames.
This means that, at a minimum, you’ll want an RTX 4080 Super or a base model 4080, though you might find the experience acceptable with the 4070 Ti Super, 4070 Ti, or perhaps the 4060 Super. Based on online footage, combat appears to be quite fast-paced, so anything below 60 fps with frame generation enabled is likely to feel subpar. This suggests that the RTX 3080 and lower-tier GPUs on this graph will provide a less-than-ideal experience for most gamers.
As expected, those of you using Radeon GPUs, even the 7900 XTX, won’t be able to play Black Myth: Wukong at the maximum ray tracing quality settings. The 7900 XTX performed only on par with the RTX 4060, which is far from satisfactory.
Moving up to 1440p, the RTX 4090 remains the only GPU capable of delivering what we consider a good or at least acceptable experience with frame generation enabled. The 4080 Super and 4080 may feel noticeably laggy during combat and fast-action scenes. The 4070 Super only managed 65 fps, which doesn’t provide a great experience at these settings, in our opinion.
Thus, at 1440p with these quality settings, the RTX 4070 is insufficient for most gamers, and anything slower will be unusable. In such cases, you’d likely need to lower the quality settings.
Now, at 4K, the performance of the RTX 4090 is debatable. In the past, with most games, frame generation at 70 fps has resulted in a suboptimal experience.
We don’t believe that the data for the 4090 will lead to an outstanding experience at 4K, though this can be subjective. Ideally, you’d want to lower the resolution scaling at 4K to around 50%, which would equate to a DLSS performance setting.
Under these quality settings, the 4080 Super and anything below it will struggle, as sub-60 fps with frame generation enabled is not ideal.
