We Benchmarked 35 GPUs in Black Myth Wukong

Settings

Before we get into the testing though, let’s talk about the settings. Though I have no confirmation, I’d like to think that no drastic changes will happen between what we see in the benchmark tool and the final release of the game. The settings menu is pretty simple and is broken up between “Display” and “Graphics” and there really isn’t a huge amount of settings.

In the “Display” menu, you have the opportunity to change display, display mode from borderless to windowed, change the aspect ratio, resolution, set a framerate cap of 30, 60, 120FPS or off, enable or disable V-Sync and adjust the motion blur intensity.

In the “graphics” menu, there’s a bit more going on. Firstly, you can let the game decide as to what graphics settings should be set to or you can dial things in manually yourself. This involves adjusting super resolution, changing the sampling technology between TSR, XeSS, DLSS and FSR if your card supports them, and then for everything apart from XeSS, you have the option for Frame Generation.

As the game is made in conjunction with NVIDIA, it gives you the option for Full Ray Tracing, as the game has ray tracing turned on as standard, but this setting is more for those who want to experience path tracing and the like and then, you get the option for which level of full Ray Tracing you want.

Beyond that, you have your graphics preset which ranges from low, medium, high, very high and cinematic, and we’ve tested all of them to show the difference in performance between them. Obviously beyond the presets, you can then adjust the individual quality of effects, shadows, global illumination, reflections and so on.

Now when it comes to upscaling, you technically can’t turn it off as such., and instead can change the slider from between 25 to 100 which technically 100 means that you’re at 100% scaling of the resolution, so I guess you could say that it’s off, but it may confuse some people slightly.

Now one niggly thing that I noticed, sadly after I had spent a couple of hours testing, was that when you increase the resolution on the display page, the super resolution scale automatically adjusts down as you go up to 1440p or 4K for instance. We’ve seen similar “features” like this in other games, so it’s no surprise, but still a bit of an annoyance nonetheless.

To see how various graphics cards do at various resolutions and presets. Now I will warn you that there’s a lot of data to go through, as we’ve spent the best part of a week running each test, taking close to 2 hours per GPU. Luckily the testing, apart from taking a while, did go relatively smoothly, aside from the niggly thing with the super resolution changing when we first started testing, but beyond that, things all went to plan.

For our testing, we used our GPU test system with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RGB 6000MHz CL30 DDR5 memory. For the motherboard, we used the Gigabyte B650E AORUS Master with the latest BIOS version installed along with Windows 11, on its latest update. Driver wise, we used AMD, Intel and NVIDIA’s latest drivers and we tested over 25 GPUs in total including all cards from the latest generations from them as well as some older cards to see how they’d hold up. For the scaler, we decided to use TSR to fairly be able to compare AMD, Intel and NVIDIA cards against each other without utilising their respective technologies.