We Benchmarked 35 GPUs in Black Myth Wukong

Ray Tracing and Frame Generation

Now I mentioned earlier in regards to full Ray Tracing and upscaling including frame generation, where applicable. It’s here where we took both the RTX 4090 and 7900 XTX to see what kind of uplifts we could get with upscaling and frame generation, along with enabling Ray Tracing in its entirety to see what effect that has, and then again, seeing what levels of performance we could bring things up to again, using upscaling and frame generation.

What we found was the RX 7900 XTX didn’t see any real uplift in performance changing from TSR to FSR, separated by just a single frame per second. Frame generation on the AMD card saw an uplift of 81%, while setting the scaling to 50% saw a bigger uplift of 88%. Combining the two led to a frame rate of 106 FPS, which gives us a 231% increase in frames so running at 4K cinematic still gives us some great looking visuals while keeping performance up.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for Ray Tracing where no matter the situation, the 7900 XTX just falls flat on its face. With no upscaling or frame generation, we drop down to just 4 frames per second, and while the best case scenario is frame generation and 50% upscaling, that still only results in 27 frames per second, so really your only option is to reduce the resolution, or graphics preset or both.

In terms of the RTX 4090, it’s no surprise that it fairs better. From it’s 41 FPS at native using TSR, we do see an increase when enabling DLSS of 17%, now sitting at 48 FPS, though frame gen helps push that further up to 77 FPS, which is another 60% more performance, though 50% upscaling and frame gen is where you ideally want to be at 121 FPS, which is almost a 200% increase from native, though you could tweak the upscaling level to bring that down slightly, while still getting smooth gameplay.

Ray Tracing drops performance by almost half, now sitting at 22 FPS and this time, DLSS doesn’t really do anything with a change from TSR. Frame Gen brings performance back up to native levels at 41 FPS though the most impressive result is with frame gen turned on and upscaling set to 50%, which gives us 98 frames per second, for the very best visuals, upscaling aside, and good, strong performance.