Black Myth: Wukong PS5 Version Suffering From Strange Issues

On Tuesday, the highly anticipated Black Myth: Wukong hit the market, breaking a slew of records and currently sitting at number two on the list of games with the most concurrent players on Steam. But while PC players enjoy the beautiful graphics and notice recurring stuttering issues, the PS5 version is significantly worse. And it’s probably understandable why the developers kept it a secret until the last minute.

The game offers three modes on the Sony console: Quality, Balance, and Performance. They don’t differ much in terms of graphics settings, the biggest difference being resolution. Quality uses FSR upscaling from a dynamic resolution of 1440p, while Balance and Performance use 1080p. Performance is much more complex, however.

Performance mode does indeed maintain 60 FPS most of the time, although there are dips here too, but the catch is a little different. This is not the classic 60 FPS, but frame generation from 30 to 60 frames per second. Since Wukong is a dynamic action game full of effects, the resolution is not very high, and the base frame rate is low, then when generating frames there are problems not only with a large delay, but also with the image quality, which suffers greatly. Every second frame is generated and contains a significant number of artifacts.

Balanced mode might seem like a solid option until you realize that it’s not 40 FPS at 120Hz, but a completely incomprehensible 45 FPS at 60Hz. Since the PS5 can’t manually change the refresh rate and doesn’t have full VRR, so the window ends at 48Hz, the entire game feels very choppy despite the relatively stable frame rate. Because the frame rate and refresh rate aren’t aligned, some images take longer to appear, while others take less time.

The last option is the Quality mode, which could be a bit of a confidence booster, but it lacks the most important thing: a 30 FPS lock. So the game stays just above 30 FPS most of the time and doesn’t feel smooth, since the frame rate can’t be divided by the 60 Hz refresh rate here either. Interestingly, according to Digital Foundry, the Quality mode may not be fully unlocked, since the frame rate is surprisingly stable, but it uses some weird dynamic lock that doesn’t seem to go above 38 FPS.

Overall, none of the modes are perfect, and you’ll have to take that into account if you pick up the game on PS5. But let’s hope the developers fix these fundamental issues soon, because at least the Balance and Quality modes shouldn’t be too difficult. And it’s true that visually, this is one of the most beautiful games in recent memory.