Black Myth: Wukong GeForce RTX 4090 Performance

Written by John Yan on 8/30/2024 for PC  

Black Myth: Wukong has taken the PC gaming scene by storm making records as a game with one of the highest concurrent amount of players on Steam. It’s been described as God of War with Chinese mythology and a solid action RPG. It’s also a game that really takes advantage of a lot of NVIDIA technologies.

From DLSS 3 with frame generation to full path ray tracing, Black Myth: Wukong has pretty much all the tricks to deliver impressive visuals and a solid frame rate. We’re going to go through a few settings to see how this will run on a high end gaming system running at 4K resolution.

DLSS 3 with frame generation helps by upscaling the image from a lower resolution and then using AI to interpolate frames in between the times the game generates them. It’s gotten a lot better over the years and if you can handle a little bit of extra latency, it can really help with the FPS and offer up a smoother experience without many or any noticeable artifacts.

Full Ray Tracing, or path tracing, is sort of the holy grail of Ray Tracing. It’s used in feature films, for example, to more accurately depict realistic representations of light bouncing off surfaces. It’s a very expensive operation and even with the powerful GeForce RTX 4090, it still can bring graphics performance to its knees. There’s not many games out there that really support it, but Black Myth: Wukong is one of the few and we’re going to check out how well it performs as well as if turning it on does make a drastic visual difference that you’ll want to use it and incur the performance hit.

There are four types of ray tracing techniques for Black Myth: Wukong. We have the standard lighting, which everyone should be familiar with as well as ray traced shadows. Reflections is the third and that should also be pretty self explanatory. The fourth is Ray-Traced Caustics, which is only enabled when you set the Full Ray Tracing Level to Very High.

Ray-Traced Caustics is, as explained by NVIDIA, objects in regions where a sufficient amount of light bounces off of a surface, causing it to be brighter than the average area scene. They cite an example of light bouncing and twisting off of rippling water being more subtly enhanced, making it a more realistic immersive image. As you can see from the image below, the Ray-Traced image looks much nicer than the non-Ray-Traced image with Ray-Traced caustics.

For my test system, the PC specs consist of:

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert Overclocking 10L DDR5 64GB Kit (2 x 32GB) 6000MHz (PC5-48000)
ASRock B65-E PG Riptide WiFi motherboard
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
Samsung 990 Pro 4TB SSD
LG OLED42C2PUA 42"

We’ll use the built in benchmark to test the various settings I’ve listed below. I’ll also run through a few of the game itself to see how much of an impact having full ray tracing on is compared to it being off. All tests were run 3 times and what you see is the average of the three runs.

Let’s get a baseline test. We’ll run the benchmark with the default settings minus motion blur. You can see all the settings I’ve used below but everything was set to Cinematic. One weird thing about the graphics setting for DLSS is that in past games, there was an option to turn on and off DLSS along with different levels of DLSS. Here, we have a slider that changes what the rubric says the DLSS performance is set at. For each level, I’ll set the slider to the point where the description just changes instead of playing around with the slider too much. So for the baseline, we’ll set the Super Resolution Sampling to DLSS and the Super Resolution to 100, which the game says it’s set to DLAA.

Without any adjustments and running straight rasterization, we get an OK 47.56 FPS average with a 1% lows of 38.18. We’re striving for 60 fps minimum and we do get there once we turn on DLSS. With Quality DLSS, we get an average of 67.70 FPS with 1% lows at 54.74. Upping the DLSS to Balanced nets almost a 58% increase with an average of 74.92 FPS and the 1% lows of 59.78 FPS. So at 4K, adding some DLSS in there at even Quality mode does make it pretty good in terms of frame rate.

What if you don’t want to use DLSS and run the game at native resolution? You can enable Frame Generation without any DLSS.

As you can see, Frame Generation achieves close to Balanced DLSS performance with 77.88 FPS average on 57.80 FPS for the 1% lows. If you truly wanted to run natively, enabling Frame Generation seems like a solid viable option on the GeForce RTX 4090. There is a slight problem though as latency jumps up from the mid 80s ms to the 100s ms making it feel a little more sluggish.

Combining the two methods of DLSS and Frame Generation will net you some really good gains. Below are the performances in both Quality and Balanced with Frame Generation enabled.

With DLSS3, you get solid performance on both Quality and Balanced settings and here is where I’d stick to Quality with the setup I have. Picture quality is good and I didn’t notice much difference if any from Quality to native resolution. What's interesting is I get better latency with DLSS enabled than native rendering as it was in the high 80s while DLSS3 produced latency in the mid 40s to upper 50s.

Now let’s talk about Ray-Tracing. As mentioned earlier, Black Myth: Wukong supports path tracing enabling very high quality lighting effects. One of the things I noticed is that without it, shadows can be a blurry blob on surfaces that aren’t too far away, becoming clearer up close. With Ray-Tracing, the shadows look a lot more high quality even from a distance.

There are some areas that benefit more than others in terms of lighting. It can make an already great looking game in Black Myth: Wukong even better and there were times I’d stand there and stare at the water or the sunlight bouncing off objects. It will tank the performance of the game with every Ray-Tracing option enabled as you can see by this graph.

That pretty much puts it in the unplayable range, but that’s why we have DLSS. Let’s see how well it performs without Frame Generation at first.

Frame rates are better, but definitely not where we prefer it. DLSS does give a nice 83% up lift when turned on and 126% when going to Balanced DLSS. Still, we’re not getting a solid 60FPS that we want when playing this type of game, so let’s try turning Frame Generation on.

And here we see at both Quality and Balanced DLSS3 where we get solid performance. Balanced DLSS3 is where the 1% lows stay above the magical 60FPS mark, but Quality is nothing to sneeze at and that’s where I play most of the time. From Frameview, I was getting around 64ms latency at Quality DLSS3 and 55ms at Balanced DLSS3. If you’re going to keep everything at Cinematic and playing at 4K with a GeForce RTX 4090, then I think having it set to Quality DLSS3 is a good spot for good performance and great visuals.

Black Myth: Wukong is a gorgeous game and if you’ve got the system to play it at max settings, you’ll be treated to a fun cinematic experience. DLSS3 really helps with performance in this very demanding game and for those wanting to push their machine to the max, this game will do just that. I like to thank NVIDIA for providing both the game and the graphics card for this article.