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Black Myth: Wukong - Our benchmarks of the new Unreal Engine 5 game
Klaus Hinum (translated by Daisy Dickson) Published 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 ...
Tech
Black Myth: Wukong is a much-anticipated Unreal Engine 5 game and impresses with detailed graphics and numerous effects. The studio Game Science has released a benchmark tool on Steam to give you a brief impression of its graphics and, of course, whether you have a computer that is fast enough to play Wukong smoothly.
The benchmark depicts a replayable flight sequence with the camera through the jungle and is probably intended to show the typical load during the game. At the end, you can see a detailed summary of the frame rates. As the game is—according to published gameplay scenes—an action-packed third-party RPG with lots of battles, you should aim for a frame rate of at least 60fps.
Engine
Unreal Engine 5 which is used supports all current PC features such as ray tracing (Nvidia only) and upscaling via Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR, Intel XeSS and Unreal Engine's TSR. Frame generation is also supported. When changing the settings, the benchmark tool doesn't require a restart—only the ray tracing settings are currently not applied correctly without restarting it. Furthermore, there is a bug when selecting resolutions with a different aspect ratio (e.g. 16:9 on a 16:10 monitor). To do this, you have to set a resolution in the intended aspect ratio in Windows in advance.
Despite shaders being compiled when first booting up the benchmark tool, we still noted some stutters in the first one or two runs during our tests.
Selected settings
As upscaling can't be switched off separately, we opted for the TSR setting with the slider set to "100", as upscaling should technically be switched off in this case. For the settings, we used the predefined presets "low", "medium", "high" and "cinematic". The "very high" setting was only slightly faster than "cinematic", which is why we didn't use it.
Benchmark
As mentioned, we used the tool's integrated benchmark—there is only one sequence and you can only select the run in a loop. The display of the results only lacks the division between CPU and GPU that has been frequently seen recently.
Results
The first benchmarks quickly showed that Black Myth: Wukong is a very demanding game. Using a popular and relatively powerful RTX 3060 laptop GPU, the benchmark only ran just about smoothly in 1920 x 1080 with the "medium" settings. At 41fps, however, there is little room for maneuver and you are probably not very well-equipped for combat. It is therefore advisable to use the lowest detail level in this scenario.
A high-end laptop graphics card such as the GeForce RTX 4080 laptop GPU is required for high details. However, resolutions higher than 1920 x 1080 are only possible with a reduced detail level.
This means that using upscaling technology is always recommended, namely DLSS with Nvidia GPUs, and optionally also Frame Generation. DLSS helped an RTX 3080 Mobile to achieve 50 % more frames during our test.
Nvidia ray tracing cost around 30 % in the test; the RTX 4080 in the Razer Blade managed a visually smooth 58 frames per second with DLSS, Frame Generation and ray tracing. Frame Generation contributed around 10fps in this case.
Note
As gaming tests are very time-consuming and are often restricted by installation and activation limits, we can only provide some of the benchmarks at the time of publishing the article. Additional graphics cards will be added later.
Overview
