We Benchmarked 35 GPUs in Black Myth Wukong

Final Thoughts

So going into this, I had high hopes for the visual quality of the game and it didn’t disappoint. The game looks simply stunning from the lighting and shadows, down to the reflections on the water. While this is only a benchmark tool, I’d hope that it’s going to be a true representation of what to expect in the game, because otherwise, what’s the point in releasing this tool for users to see how their current hardware will perform if it’s not a true and accurate representation of what they will experience in game?

Performance wise, I won’t lie, even if you’re rocking an RTX 4090 and on anything higher than the high preset on 4K, you’re going to see sub 60 FPS with the high preset hitting it right on the money. Other older and slower cards really are going to see things struggle at 4K but above 30 FPS still managed to maintain a smooth and fluid experience so going back through our testing data, it’s a decision as to if you want to go higher resolution and lower graphics preset, or the opposite, and going lower resolution and a higher graphics preset. The land of diminishing returns is always going to rear its ugly head when you start cycling through graphics presets as to if bumping up the settings actually gives you much more in terms of visual fidelity or as an individual if you just can’t notice the increase in visuals in comparison to the hit you’ll take in terms of performance.

Obviously you can dial things in a little more when looking at the individual settings and instead of using a preset as intended, you can set it, and tweak things to get a balance of visual fidelity that suits you, along with the performance levels you’re expecting. High frame rates isn’t everything in this game, as it’s not a competitive shooter or the like so you can get away with sub 60, but be warned that more intensive parts of the game, when it releases may hinder your experience overall. To combat this, you do have upscaling which in a game like this, much like we saw in Alan Wake 2 can be a real godsend and bring levels of performance back up to levels that you’d expect.

What we have seen here today is that the game really can push the limits of modern day hardware as we prepare for the next wave of future generation graphics cards to hit the market and that’s why it’s no wonder that the developers have baked Ray Tracing into the game as standard, and give a ton of options for various upscaling technologies, not just from AMD, Intel and NVIDIA but also in the form of TSR which was developed by Epic Games as part of the Unreal Engine. It allows those who are on older and varying hardware to still see the buzz is about without having the latest GPU on the market.

I’m looking forward to the game releasing and seeing if the reviews stay consistent with what we’ve seen appear on the benchmark tool so definitely leave a comment once it launches about what you think of the game, and if your performance lines up with what you saw here today.