Black Myth: Wukong Through Other Eyes. What impact do AI and other modern technologies have on the game?

For starters, don’t expect another regular review from me – read it here, this game is not even the genre I’m looking for. What interests me most about the game is the optimization for NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards and the use of technologies such as DLSS Super Resolution, frame generation and, of course, ray tracing. And how will these tools be able to tune the game’s performance even on a less powerful device? I decided to test it on two different machines: a desktop PC with Asus ROG Strix GeForce 4070 Super graphics and an Intel i5-12400F processor (yes, that processor deserves an upgrade) and my 14-day-old Lenovo LOQ laptop with a 115W NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 based on Intel i5-13450HX processor. Before I get into the benchmarks, I’d like to thank Nvidia for their support in creating this article.

To begin with, I can note that the game runs at maximum detail at over 60 FPS on both devices. However, on the laptop I already had to enable some technologies from NVIDIA, and on the desktop PC this difference was compensated by a more powerful video card, despite the weaker processor.

Graphics settings and NVIDIA technology

In the graphics settings, you can play with several advanced technologies. The first is DLSS Super Resolution, where you have several options to choose from. The first step is to set the resolution you are adjusting to a percentage relative to your native resolution. A lower percentage means a lower resolution, which DLSS then converts to a higher resolution. The higher the percentage you set, the sharper the image, but at the cost of FPS. For a laptop, the ideal compromise was a setting of about 50%; for a desktop PC, I settled on a value of about 60%. It should be noted that I was playing at 1080p on the laptop, which is a resolution at which these technologies don’t have as much of an impact as on the desktop, where I was playing at 1440p, or specifically a widescreen 3440 x 1440 pixels.

Next, you choose the upscale technology itself – for NVIDIA cards this is DLSS. The latest innovation available only from NVIDIA on GeForce RTX 40 series cards is frame generation. This technology generates images using artificial intelligence using custom Tensor cores on the card. The result is, in some cases, an increase in frames per second of up to two times. The difference in smoothness is astounding, especially on a laptop where frame generation greatly improved image quality at higher graphics settings.

Ray tracing – beauty at a price of performance

For those who want to take the game to perfection, there is an option to enable full ray tracing. This technology offers three settings levels (Low, Medium and Very High) and is known to put a significant strain on graphics. In my testing, I saw around a 10-15% FPS drop with ray tracing enabled, which in some cases dropped below 60 FPS on the laptop. I didn’t notice any significant visual or performance differences between the Low and Medium settings, where the difference was about 1 frame per second.

However, when you set Ray Tracing to maximum, the game reveals the full beauty of its reflections on water or in wet environments, albeit at the cost of a drop in FPS of more than 15 frames. On my laptop, I got around 75-85 fps at optimal settings, which was still smooth and playable. It’s a bit of a shame, however, that you have to restart the game to disable ray tracing – during intense fights it would be useful to disable it for a while. But personally, I prefer the visual beauty of the world over maximum performance, so I mostly left ray tracing enabled.

Comparison with ray tracing turned off (left) and on (right).

RTX OFF/ON

RTX OFF/ON

RTX OFF/ON

DLSS and super resolution – performance trade-off

Unfortunately, you cannot completely disable super resolution in the game. If you set it to 100%, DLSS will essentially switch to DLAA, which means it uses AI for anti-aliasing. But for this installation you will need a really powerful computer. On my laptop I got 30-40 FPS with this setting without ray tracing enabled, which was far from ideal. Lower graphics detail could make the game smoother, but that would be a shame for such a visually stunning game.

During testing, I experimented with different combinations of graphics settings, such as disabling and enabling frame generation and ray tracing, or different super resolution percentages. Thanks to the built-in benchmark, I was able to accurately compare the results and find the perfect balance between image quality and performance on both devices.

A magic called Frame Generation.

I was very surprised how well frame generation works in practice. I expected it to add a lot of artifacts to the game, hallucinate, and generate meaningless images. But whatever magic NVIDIA used, I barely noticed a difference. Sometimes when moving quickly around the character it was noticeable that something was wrong, but even after disabling Frame Generation this effect remained – rather it was caused by upscaling using DLSS. As for the frame generation itself, it was able to increase FPS up to 100% without negatively affecting image quality, especially when I had very low FPS.

For my first PC test, I deliberately set the resolution to a maximum of 1440p, turning off DLSS and frame generation, just to see what the hardware itself could handle. In terms of characteristics, my Asus ROG GeForce RTX 4070 Super should be on par with the previous generation GeForce RTX 3090 Ti card, which I still can’t figure out. However, I found the game to be nearly unplayable at maximum detail on this hardware, likely due to my CPU. I barely broke the 30 FPS mark in the benchmark. I was even more surprised when enabling Frame Generation immediately raised FPS to an acceptable 60+. And at the same time, visually no difference was visible. If I also turned off ray tracing I would get very good performance.

In conclusion

I really enjoyed the game, although I haven’t finished it yet, and it will probably be one of those games that I play a little at a time over the course of six months. What to do, loot won’t keep you waiting in Destiny! 😀 Technically the game simply amazed me. I’ve only had the laptop and new graphics card on my PC for a short time, and Black Myth: Wukong was the first game in which I was able to properly test all the new generation GeForce RTX graphics technologies. I have to admit that with Frame Generation I was able to leave ray tracing enabled and still have enough FPS to run the game smoothly and enjoy its visual beauty.

Overall, I would venture to say that Frame Generation is the biggest asset of the current generation of NVIDIA cards. The choice of graphic details and settings always depends on personal preference. Some people don’t mind the FPS drop in exchange for nicer graphics, while others can’t play until they have at least 200 FPS. I belong to the first group – even on consoles, I’ve always preferred the visual experience to be as smooth as possible. That’s why I’m a big fan of AI technologies that are starting to blur the lines between beautiful and fluid gaming experiences.