Black Myth Wukong PC benchmarks: A tour de force for Nvidia’s ray tracing hardware (Updated)

Black Myth Wukong screenshots

Black Myth Wukong, a feast for the eyes

Black Myth Wukong launched on August 20, 2024 for PC and console gamers, but if you want to see everything the game has to offer — graphically speaking — you’ll want to play it on an Nvidia GPU. The game supports full ray tracing, often referred to as “path tracing” in Nvidia parlance, and as expected it’s quite brutal in terms of GPU demands. But you don’t need to have an RTX GPU or path tracing to enjoy the game, as even in pure rasterization mode it’s quite beautiful. Our cohorts over at PCGamer scored it an 87, if you’re wondering whether the game is any good or not.

We’re more interested in seeing how it runs on some of the best graphics cards, and we’ve tested most of the latest generation Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs to see how they stack up. There’s also a standalone Black Myth benchmarking tool, which uses the same built-in benchmark as the main game, so that’s helpful if you want to check performance.

(Update: We’ve added three RTX 30-series and three RX 6000-series GPUs to the charts. The text has not been updated to reflect the older GPUs’ performance, but in general the older cards are slower compared to the current models. That’s 23 GPUs in total tested now, which seems like a good stopping point. Sound off in the comments if you’d like to see anything we’ve skipped.)

We’re glad to see a full complement of supported technologies from the game, with DLSS 3.7.1 upscaling and frame generation alongside FSR 3.1 upscaling and frame generation, plus XeSS 1.3 upscaling for good measure. There still appear to be some rendering issues with FSR, however, as we noticed far more ghosting and artifacts than with DLSS. We’ve opted to test with 67% scaling in all cases, as we feel most gamers will be better served by the higher performance that offers compared to native resolution, even if there’s the occasional loss in image fidelity.

For this initial look at how Black Myth Wukong runs on PC, we’ve used our standard GPU test PC, which consists of an Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU, 32GB of DDR5-6400 memory, and a 4TB Crucial T700 PCIe 5.0 SSD for storage. Then we’ve tested most of the current generation AMD, Nvidia, and Intel graphics cards, using the latest drivers from the respective companies. We have preview Nvidia 560.87 drivers — it’s an Nvidia-promoted game, if that wasn’t clear — which have the same game optimizations as the public 560.94 drivers. We’re also using AMD 24.7.1 and Intel 5971 drivers, though AMD’s drivers are not “game ready” for Black Myth Wukong.

We aren’t testing every current gen GPU, choosing instead to skip the Nvidia RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti, replacing them with their newer Super variants. Testing is also ongoing, as it takes quite a while to get through all the settings we want to look at for each card, so we’ll be adding some of the missing data over the coming day or two, and we may add some previous generation GPUs as a reference point as well.

We’re testing with the medium preset at 1080p, again with 67% scaling manually dialed in — the game always seems to drop that one point to 66% scaling after you exit the menu (and will drop from 66% to 65% if you start there, FYI). We also test with the ‘cinematic’ preset at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K, again with 67% scaling manually dialed in. Nearly all of the testing has been done without frame generation, simply because we find that feature to be more of a marketing item than something that truly improves the overall gaming experience, though we do have one chart where we enabled framegen just to show how the game runs in that mode.

Our baseline testing runs in pure rasterization mode (i.e. using Unreal Engine’s Lumen), for what will become obvious reasons. Then we use the same settings as before, except with the “Full Ray Tracing” turned on, using the low RT preset combined with medium quality and then the very high RT settings with the cinematic preset at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. We also test with maxed out 1080p settings with frame generation enabled as one final data point, to see how that affects “performance” — or at least the number of generated frames delivered to your monitor.

We’ll have screenshots and a discussion of image fidelity at the various settings later, but it’s easy to dismiss the full RT option at first. It’s a bit of a wash in terms of what it does to the visuals at the low and medium settings, while the very high option kills performance — particularly on non-Nvidia GPUs. It does improve the visuals of the game, adding a lot of details, but it’s very much a feature designed for those with at least an RTX 4070 or faster GPU.

Black Myth Wukong Medium GPU performance

But let’s start with the rasterization performance. Each setting gets run at least twice, using the higher result; the first test (i.e. after launching the game) gets run three times and we discard the first result. The built-in benchmark lasts about 145 seconds, if you’re wondering, so that’s a lot of time required to test up to nine different settings on each GPU.

We start with the medium preset, which offers a good blend of visual fidelity and performance. Unreal Engine’s Lumen and Nanite technologies are put to good use, though classifying Lumen as “software ray tracing” is a bit of a stretch — it’s more accurate to call it “shader-based rendering with some calculations that approximate ray tracing,” which is basically what “rasterization” means in my bood. There are elements of the tech that may qualify as RT-lite, but reflections are one example where it’s using traditional screen space reflections. We’ll have more to say about that in the image quality discussion.

One other item to mention is that the game uses upscaling by default at all settings. It uses a slider with a range of 25 to 100 — that’s 16X upscaling to native, if you’re wondering. It will set the scale to 66% at 1080p, 50% at 1440p, and 44% at 4K (and 80% at 1600×900 if you’re wondering — only 720p defaults to 100% scaling).

If you’re used to the standard Quality, Balanced, and Performance upscaling modes, the values used by Black Myth Wukong are more aggressive in general. Quality mode normally means ~2X upscaling, or ~71% of the target resolution; Balanced mode uses ~3X upscaling, or ~58% scaling; and Performance mode uses ~4X upscaling, or 50% of the target resolution. (DLSS, FSR, and XeSS can use slightly different values as well, depending on the game and version, but we’re trying not to get too bogged down in the nitty gritty details.)

For our purposes, we don’t want to rely on different scaling values, so we set a static 67% scaling for all of our testing. That means we’re rendering at 1280×720 for 1080p output, 1707×960 for 1440p output, and 2560×1440 for 4K output. If we used the game’s defaults, the render resolutions would be 1280×720, 1280×720, and 1707×960 for those same respective outputs — which would mean the 1080p and 1440p results would be quite similar, other than differences in upscaling overhead. Running the game at maximum settings at native rendering is a good way to further reduce performance, if you like lower fps for whatever reason.

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Our first look at performance seems quite good overall. Nearly everything we tested easily breaks 60 fps. Sure, older generation GPUs are more likely to struggle, and we’ll try to test some of those in the near future, but you only need a budget $200 graphics card to have a good experience in Black Myth Wukong.

The AMD vs Nvidia results are also pretty reasonable. We’re used to seeing the 4080 Super just ahead of the 7900 XTX, for example, and the 7900 XT usually ends up pretty close to the 4070 Ti Super. Some of the lower tier AMD cards don’t match up as well, though. If you look at our GPU benchmarks hierarchy, focusing on the rasterization performance, the 7700 XT beats the 4060 Ti by 16%; here, it’s only 4% faster. The 7800 XT likewise beats the vanilla RTX 4070 by 6%, but here it’s 1% slower.

It’s not too surprising, perhaps, as Black Myth Wukong has been heavily promoted by Nvidia. Even though Unreal Engine 5 on its own should be somewhat GPU agnostic, developers need to tune it for their particular game, and that can lead to vendor specific optimizations.

What about Intel Arc? Well, despite having game ready drivers, it’s really part of an older generation of hardware — it was designed to compete with the RTX 3060, and mostly does so in games where drivers don’t hold it back. It’s also a lot like Nvidia GPUs in that it often performs worse than AMD ‘equivalents’ in rasterization games, but comes out ahead with ray tracing.

The A770 16GB and A750 end up as the two slowest GPUs that we’ve tested so far, with the A770 just barely edging past 60 fps while the A750 only manages 52 fps. The A770 also has 14% more raw compute than the A750, plus more memory, so performing 20% better than the A750 isn’t totally out of the ordinary — just a bit wider of a gap than we normally see. Minimums are also lower on the Intel GPUs, and the numbers further driver optimizations could be beneficial. These aren’t unexpected results, though, as the A770 and A750 also rank below the RX 7600 in our GPU hierarchy.

Black Myth Wukong Cinematic GPU performance

Before we get to the results of the ‘cinematic’ preset, let’s be clear: We’re not trying to show the best mix of settings for the various GPUs. Our purpose is to show how the GPUs stack up, in terms of performance potential, and so we like to punish the GPUs with maxed out settings.

If you’re looking to just play Black Myth Wukong, the high preset tends to run about 50~60 percent faster than the cinematic preset and is what we recommend for most users in this particular game. We’ll discuss the various presets and image fidelity later, but there are very much diminishing returns when going beyond the high preset.

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

There’s a pretty massive hit to performance when using the cinematic preset, and you can see why the game defaults to turning on upscaling. All of the GPUs we tested see their performance cut in half, or more, relative to the medium preset. Nearly everything is still technically playable, but you’ll need at least an RTX 4070 Super to get above 60 fps at these settings.

The same patterns as before hold here as well. The AMD and Nvidia matchups generally look close at the top, but as you go down the performance ladder the RTX GPUs punch slightly above their normal weight class. The 4060 Ti might cost as much as a 7700 XT, but for rasterization performance AMD usually comes out with a clear lead.

Intel’s Arc GPUs again take up position at the bottom of the chart. The A770 is only about 10% slower than the RX 7600, which isn’t too far off what we normally see for rasterization games, but it’s also falling just shy of 30 fps, with minimums dipping into the upper teens. We’ve also seen other games where the 8GB A750 struggles, even when other 8GB GPUs don’t, and at least so far that doesn’t seem to be a major issue with Black Myth Wukong. The A770 comes out 17% ahead of the A750, which is pretty much right in line with the difference in compute teraflops.

We didn’t run the high preset on every GPU, due to time constraints, but as you’ll see in our image quality analysis, that tends to be the sweet spot in terms of balancing image fidelity and performance. As mentioned above, it runs about 50~60 percent faster than the cinematic preset, and in general it looks nearly as good. The minor differences in shadows and foliage aren’t enough to warrant the performance hit in our opinion.

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Moving up to 1440p with the cinematic preset, performance doesn’t drop too much compared to 1080p. That’s perhaps partly because we have 67% scaling enabled, but the GPUs we tested are all around 12~17 percent slower than at the lower resolution.

That’s enough to drop a few cards below acceptable rates — the RTX 4060 and below are all pretty marginal at these settings — but tweaks to the settings should allow these cards to handle 1440p at lower settings. Obviously, there are plenty of GPUs that are slower than the ones we’ve tested, and older cards aren’t going to like 1440p.

The standings of the individual GPUs haven’t shifted at all compared to 1080p medium. That’s an interesting result, as usually there are at least a few shifts. Also notice that the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and 8GB, along with the RX 7600 XT and vanilla 7600, offer basically identical performance. Clearly we’re not exceeding 8GB of VRAM four our testing.

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

4K cinematic once again results in nearly identical standings, with the Arc A770 being the only position change. There’s a less than normal drop in performance as well (compared to other games) when looking at these 4K results compared to 1440p. That’s at least partly because of upscaling, as otherwise native 4K rendering often bumps up VRAM requirements… but we’ve seen plenty of other games exceed 8GB of VRAM use, so it’s a bit of a breath of fresh air to see the RX 7600, RTX 4060, and RTX 4060 Ti all managing to keep pace.

Those GPUs we just named aren’t playable at 4K, mind you, but they’re slow because of the demands of the game engine, not because they’re thrashing on VRAM allocation. If you want at least borderline playable, you’ll need the RX 7800 XT or RTX 4070 as a minimum for 4K (yes, with upscaling).

Curiously, and this is something we’ve seen in other games, the Arc A750 does fall off the pace here, even while other 8GB cards do fine. It’s not a big deal, because even though 19 fps is much higher than 11 fps, neither Arc GPU can really deal with 4K in Black Myth Wukong. As we’ll see on the next tests with full RT, Intel’s drivers do appear to need more tuning for this game.

What about hitting 60 fps at 4K, though? The only GPU to manage that is the mighty RTX 4090. It will probably be joined by at least the RTX 5080 and 5090 when those Nvidia Blackwell GPUs arrive, and maybe by an RDNA 4 GPU or two as well, but those are seemingly months away at best.

As said above, the high preset should improve performance by around 50~60 percent, perhaps more in some cases. That would make 4K viable for 4060 Ti and above, and maybe even the 4060 and RX 7600 in a pinch.

Black Myth Wukong full ray tracing performance

If the results from the cinematic testing seemed at times pretty poor, just wait until you see what happens with full RT enabled. Again, check our image fidelity commentary below, where we have screenshots and a deeper discussion of how the game looks. Here, we’re just looking at the performance.

We tested using the medium preset with full RT set to low as our “easy RT” option, and then we used the cinematic preset with full RT on very high for maximum image quality — and maximum punishment of your poor graphics card. If you’ve seen performance results from other full RT implementations like Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive and Alan Wake 2, you probably already know what to expect.

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

This is where we get to a tale of two GPU types: Nvidia and everything else. For the RTX 40-series GPUs, our medium RT testing runs okay. Everything from the RTX 4060 and up breaks 60 fps — and again, that’s without using DLSS 3 frame generation. The game is definitely playable at these settings for team green’s latest GPUs, though we’ll have to see about adding some RTX 30-series results if we can find the time.

The other side of the coin is the AMD results, which start just below the 4060 if you have the ~$900 RX 7900 XTX and only get worse from there. Considering the 7900 XTX comes pretty close to the performance of the 4080 Super in the rasterization results, seeing it drop to less than half that level of performance means most AMD users shouldn’t even bother with the full RT option, other than to perhaps see what it looks like.

At least the RX 7700 XT and above are technically playable; the RX 7600 and 7600 XT and below, not so much. Interestingly, VRAM capacity still doesn’t seem to matter much, even with full RT. The RX 7600 XT and RX 7600 — as well as the RTX 4060 Ti 16GB and RTX 4060 Ti — basically offer the same level of performance. Unreal Engine 5 may have some faults, but Black Myth Wukong manages some amazing visuals without requiring a boatload of VRAM…

…Unless you have an Intel Arc A750 (and presumably the other 8GB Arc cards as well). Here again, the A770 16GB offers quite a bit more performance, more than just the raw compute should provide. It’s 33% faster than the A750 on average fps, but more tellingly it’s nearly twice as high on 1% low fps. The A750 also consistently dropped in performance after our initial test run with full RT enabled, so the drivers need some work in that regard. (We saw the same thing with 8GB Arc GPUs in the Bright Memory Infinite benchmark that finally got fixed last year, incidentally.)

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

If our ‘medium RT’ testing results looked back, the ‘maximum RT’ performance truly hurts. The RTX 4070 Super and above manage to average 60 fps or more, and the RTX 4060 and above are still perhaps playable with more than 30 fps. But AMD’s fastest GPU right now can’t even break 30 fps, and it only gets worse from here.

Also, while the arc A770 16GB does respectably, nearly catching the RX 7700 XT, the A750 performance falls off a cliff. Again, drivers, and we’ll just skip any further testing of the A750 in Black Myth Wukong for now. This is also why we didn’t bother testing the A580, as we expect it to have similar issues.

There are image quality reasons to use the full RT very high setting, as it stabilizes the foliage shadows, adds some nice reflections, improves overall scene lighting, and even has caustics on the water. You can mostly get the same image quality by using the high preset with maxed out RT, but that won’t really improve performance much as many of the default rendering options get overridden by RT anyway.

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

1440p with maxed out settings, including RT, only gets above 60 fps on the RTX 4090. You could use higher levels of upscaling as well, but image fidelity will degrade if you go that route. But if you have Nvidia’s reigning champion, it still chugs along at a comfortable 76 fps.

AMD’s GPUs all fall below 20 fps now, so unless you like trying to play a slideshow you’ll want to stick with less demanding settings. But again, we note that VRAM capacity hasn’t shown up as a limiting factor for Black Myth Wukong. We can also see this by the GPU power draw, which is basically hitting the specified limit for all the cards we tested. Normally, if you hit VRAM capacity constraints, power use will drop quite a bit due to the GPU being forced to wait for data.

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

And last but not least (unless you’re talking about framerates), we have 4K with fully maxed out settings. The RTX 4090 averages 44 fps, and the 4080 Super just squeaks past 30 fps, with minimums dropping to the mid-20s. Everything else lands in unplayable land. We’re a long way from doing full RT with all the bells and whistles on games with the graphical complexity of Black Myth Wukong, in other words.

AMD’s single-digit results are clearly less than ideal, and we can only wonder whether it’s a lack of RT hardware performance or if the game simply doesn’t have any optimizations for doing full RT on AMD hardware. Probably it’s both of those things, to varying degrees.

If you want to create a 4K chart that makes it look like a viable option, the solution is simple. First, use higher levels of upscaling — the game normally would use about a 5X upscaling factor at 4K. Then turn on framegen. Then you can show the RTX 4070 Ti Super hitting 66 fps like Nvidia does.

1080p maxed out settings with frame generation

Frame generation is often a highly controversial feature, and rightly so. Some people refer to the generated frames as “fake frames,” and they’re not really wrong. Because there’s no additional sampling of user input, and with the added overhead of framegen, it often feels more like a case of two steps backward to go two steps — maybe 2.5 steps — forward.

Let’s give a concrete example, though, before we get to the performance chart. Suppose you have a game that’s running at 50 fps, and you’re hoping to improve that result via frame generation. In a best-case scenario, framegen would double your frames to monitor rate up to 100 fps, while adding a bit of latency. If that’s how it usually worked, we’d be far more forgiving of the tech.

The reality is that if you’re running at 50 fps, turning on framegen typically has a decent amount of overhead. Instead of a simple doubling of framerates — half of which are generated — what you usually get is around 50% higher perceived fps. But a result of 75 fps using framegen means the base fps has dropped to 37.5 fps, which can definitely start to feel a bit sluggish if you’re attuned to such things.

The TLDR is that for frame generation to offer a decent experience, we typically want the generated framerate to be over 80 fps — meaning the user input sampling rate would still be 40 fps. There are situations where that can happen, but Black Myth Wukong with maxed out full RT settings running at 4K tends to be a bit too demanding on most GPUs, unless you have an RTX 4080 or 4090.

Black Myth: Wukong GPU performance

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Disclaimers aside, we did at least want to provide some performance data with framegen. We used our maxed out settings at 1080p — so the cinematic preset with very high RT quality, plus 67% resolution scaling. Then we turned on frame generation: DLSS 3 for RTX cards and FSR 3 for AMD and Intel cards (XeSS doesn’t currently have its own flavor of framegen). That gives us the above chart.

There are some interesting results, like the fact that FSR3 framegen boosts the framerate much more than DLSS3 framegen. Part of may be because the AMD GPUs are tanking so hard with the full RT settings we used for testing. But the RTX 4070 as an example gets 77 fps with framegen, versus 53 fps without, so that’s a 45% increase. We’d call that maybe acceptable, at best — going from a rendered 53 fps to 38.5 fps, but with framegen doubling that.

The RX 7900 XTX on the other hand goes from 28 fps to 52 fps, an 85% improvement. If we were looking at that level of scaling with a generated fps result of 100, it would be excellent, but 52 fps generated means the game feels like it’s running at 26 fps. And that’s AMD’s best result. Still, thanks to the better scaling (and we’re not discussing framegen image quality, which often involves more compromise), the RX 7900 XTX and XT are finally able to at least surpass the performance of the RTX 4060. Yay?

The 7900 GRE as a second example goes from 20.9 fps to 39.3 fps, for an 88% boost in framerate, but less than 40 fps with framegen enabled just isn’t a great experience. We tried it, we didn’t like it, and we died a lot more often in Black Myth Wukong as a result. It’s not completely unplayable, but it’s also not the same as a non-framegen 40 fps. The other AMD GPUs are likewise far from delivering a good experience using these settings — framegen can only do so much.

Of course you can get much higher framerates, via framegen, if you’re not using ray tracing — or if you just have a high-end RTX 40-series card. The 4070 Ti Super, 4080 Super, and 4090 all break into the desirable 100+ fps range in our 1080p testing, for example. It’s about a 45~50 percent increase in framerate for all three, so the gains are reasonably consistent. The base rendered fps still drops, but the result is certainly acceptable in terms of being playable.

The other Nvidia GPUs aren’t quite as good of an experience. The 4070 Super and 4070 run okay, but the 4060 Ti and below fall below 60 fps, which means they may look like they’re running okay but they feel like they’re running at less than 30 fps. That’s been our experience with framegen, at least.

Black Myth Wukong screenshots

(Image credit: Game Science)

Black Myth Wukong settings and image quality

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