[Music] Blackmouth Wukong is quite a taxing game on PC hardware if you're planning to play on the highest quality settings. Yes, it can look fantastic, and it even includes path-trace lighting, but to use those settings, you're not exactly going to be running at high frame rates. However, it's not all doom and gloom here because there's a huge amount of scaling on offer across the various in-game settings, so even those with mid-range hardware should be able to play the game after a few tweaks. And that's what we'll be exploring today. What does every setting in Blackm Myth Wukong do? How does it affect performance, and what are the optimal settings you should be using? Wukong is an Unreal Engine 5 game that's designed for the latest hardware and uses modern rendering technologies. There's no last-gen console version. A lot of you have already been using the free benchmark tool to assess how the game will run on your PC, and we've also used it for the performance sections of

this video. The Benchmark tool flies through basically the opening of chapter 1, so it's a real section of the game world that's representative of in-game performance. It's a great tool, and more developers should do this for their games. However, for the visual comparisons, we've got actual in-game footage from the first chapter of the game. A few quick notes about test systems before getting into everything: all visual comparisons were captured at 4K using the Nvidia GeForce RTX 490, though to maintain a reasonable frame rate, DLSS quality was used. I would strongly recommend watching this video using YouTube's 4K mode for the highest bit rate. Performance testing was performed primarily on an RTX 470 Super at 1440p with DLSS quality, though some additional testing was performed on the AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT using FSR quality. The CPU used is the AMD Ryzen 7 7800 X3D with 32 GB of DDR5 6000 memory. Let's start with the presets without Ray.

tracing enabled, of which there are five options. Most of these settings use Unreal Engine 5's software Lumen as the basis of the lighting system, which creates an excellent presentation, especially using the Cinematic preset. But focusing specifically on the lighting, you'll actually find the game looks great in this area, all the way down to about the medium preset. The quality of Shadows, Global illumination, and Reflections are all reduced when moving to medium versus the maximum preset, but the overall atmosphere of the game Still Remains, and it isn't drastically cut back. The same can't be said for the low preset, which disables many lighting effects and looks very flat and quite bad as a result. I guess this is the potato mode for running on the slowest GPUs and perhaps portable systems like the Steam Deck. The Cinematic preset does have the best lighting, with Shadow quality in particular that is near the level of hardware-based ray tracing in its accuracy, softness, and resolution. When you step down from cinematic to very high, there is a drop in Shadow quality.

that's noticeable, but other elements to lighting remain very similar. High Drops Shadow quality further and Global illumination starts to be affected as well, with a small drop in realism and depth to the lighting. Medium further cuts back on Shadow detail and lighting, especially for more distant items, and you no longer get high-resolution Shadows. The drop from high to medium lighting is probably the largest of the main presets, excluding the potato low mode, with high looking closer to the maximum preset. What these presets also affect to a significant degree is the density of the game World. This is obvious across all presets, and the drops in level of detail and dynamism are consistent across the modes. It primarily impacts foliage quality. Lower presets have fewer trees, fewer bushes, less grass, fewer leaves on tree branches, and so on, to the point where the medium mode is noticeably stripped back and less dense. The amount of dynamic tree movements with branches and leaves swaying in the wind is also cut back on lower presets, with the threshold for Dynamics moving closer to the camera with each drop in

mode. The Cinematic mode looks great here because it's rendering such a dense environment with the maximum amount of realistic movement. With that said, lower presets don't impact other aspects to Geometry all that much, so things like rocks, wooden bridges, the character all look roughly the same until you get to the low preset, which drops texture quality too awful. With Game World density being impacted heavily across the modes, there's no simple preset where you can turn the visual settings down and achieve a similar experience to the Cinematic preset. However, the high mode isn't cut back too far, and even medium looks decent for mid-range Gamers. The good news from a performance standpoint is that the presets offer huge scope for improving quality relative to the Cinematic preset. On the RTX 470 super, I saw a 13% performance Improvement moving to very high, which is visually pretty similar to cinematic. This improved to a whopping 70% gain using the high preset, and you'll more than double your performance using the medium mode. All

without touching upscaling, the low mode was 175% faster than cinematic, but the visual quality was pretty bad, and I don't expect anyone but low-end gamers will want to use that mode. The performance uplifts here were even larger using the RX 7800 XT. Here, I saw an 18% gain moving to very high, a 93% gain for the high mode, and a 146% gain for the medium mode. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend using the presets compared to optimized settings, if you did want to use a preset, the high mode is providing a great balance between visuals and performance and a significantly faster experience than the highest settings. Moving into individual settings now, and we'll start with view distance quality. This setting only has a minor impact on visuals, primarily reducing the amount of foliage on distant trees. It doesn't delete any trees; it just gives them a bit of a haircut, which also reduces the number of rendered shadows. You'll only start to notice this when dropping the setting to medium with a

further cut back on low. Dropping the setting from cinematic to medium can improve performance by about 3%, which is not overly significant. So, for most gamers with reasonable GPUs, I would leave this on the Cinematic mode. However, if you want to gain even more performance, medium is a suitable setting, with low only providing a small additional performance boost for a more substantial visual downgrade. Anti-aliasing quality doesn't do much visually, having only a minuscule impact on sharpness, with lower settings increasing the sharpening filter effect in general. Even on the lowest sharpness level of cinematic, the game is oversharpened and could do with more adjustability. This is especially noticeable in the second chapter of the game, which has a more desert-like appearance. Also, this setting has more of an impact when playing the game using TSR upscaling than DLSS or FSR, and I suspect most people are not going to be using TSR with no performance impact across the various settings. This can be left on cinematic. The post effects quality setting has

little impact on the game's presentation during general gameplay. However, it can affect some menus. For example, when viewing equipment, there's a depth of field effect around the character, which is noticeably more alias and lower quality when dropping this setting down to medium or low, with no noticeable impact to in-game performance. For the most part, this setting should be kept on the maximum level of cinematic to avoid those ugly artifacts when depth of field is used. Shadow quality is one of the most influential settings in the game from a visual and performance perspective, with each option providing noticeable differences across all examples that I looked at. Cinematic had the most realistic high-resolution shadows with the furthest draw distances and most dynamic presentation. Very high looks similar to cinematic but with a drop in resolution, so the shadows look a bit softer. High reduces many aspects to shadow quality, including resolution, draw distance in particular, reducing the number of distant shadowed elements and dynamism. Medium is a big reduction to resolution and removes many dynamic shadows, and then low disables the vast majority of shadows, making the game look

pretty flat and awful. How much of an impact this makes depends on the scene. For example, with overhead tree shadows, cinematic and very high look noticeably better than high in this scene. Moving to high not only reduces shadow quality but also makes them static instead of dynamic. But in this next example, the difference in resolution is less pronounced and shadows are still dynamic even on high, with medium being more of the threshold. This seems to be related to how far away the shadow-casting object is. Higher shadow settings create dynamic shadows from objects further away. You can see the differences in shadow cut-off in this next scene where high has a reduction in shadow quality closer to the camera. In this scene, moving to medium removes a lot of the dynamic shadows. In some scenes like the next two, there are differences in shadow quality, but it's not necessarily a stark difference. Cinematic always looks the best with the highest shadow quality, but high isn't a huge downgrade in every scene and still provides a lot of the shadows needed for the game to look good. This setting has a huge impact on

performance on an Nvidia GPU dropping from cinematic to very high didn't provide much of a gain, just a 3% difference. But dropping to high improved frame rates by 28%. Medium really isn't worth using, just a 3% difference relative to high, and then low improves frame rates further while butchering visual quality. On an AMD GPU, the gains from each setting are a little higher, with a 36% gain using High Shadows versus cinematic. For most gamers, I think the choice will be between cinematic and high Shadows. So here's a few examples focusing just on those settings for the most part. If need extra performance, then High Shadows is a great choice as it still delivers a solid visual experience while boosting frame rates by nearly 30%. If you want the absolute highest visuals, though, cinematic does improve the presentation to a noticeable degree. Texture quality is a setting you'll want to keep on cinematic unless you run out of vram, while the game can use more than 8 GB of vram after enabling Ray tracing and

frame generation without those settings. It's typically going to run fine on an 8 GB GPU, especially at 1440p. Dropping the texture setting to high results in a small reduction in texture sharpness, and then dropping it to low really hurts texture quality badly, so that setting is not recommended. This setting has no impact on performance, provided you have enough VRAM. However, what you'll notice in the game is that texture quality isn't amazing and is probably the weakest aspect of the visual presentation. Some elements look great, but others, like rocks and tree trunks, don't have textures or material quality to match the excellent lighting system. When lighting is flatter or less impressive, this weakness is more likely to show up. This is a game that could benefit from a high-resolution texture pack, really making use of those high-end cards with 16 GB or more VRAM. Given that there are settings in the game that only flagship GPU owners can use, like path tracing on very high, it would make sense for there to also be settings to max out.

vram and take visuals to the next level. But, of course, high-resolution texture packs do require more developer effort, so I can understand why that wasn't implemented. Wukong describes the visual effect quality setting as controlling fog, cloud density, and particle effects. However, it doesn't seem to make any difference on the volumetric fog used throughout the world. This effect provides a lot of ambiance, so the fact you can't disable it is probably a good thing. But the quality of fog is only average and could probably do with a resolution bump. On the highest settings, there is an impact to cloud quality, though. Again, even on the cinematic setting, cloud quality is only okay. What I did notice, though, is that this setting affects dynamic tree foliage movements, not the vegetation setting, which is a bit unusual. On cinematic and very high, you get nice tree branches moving in the wind, but dropping to high, a lot of this movement is removed entirely, making the game world more static. Disabling those dynamic tree movements provides about a 3% performance improvement, and that's

generally not something I would choose to do, given the world feels more alive on the higher settings, so I would keep this on cinematic unless you need every last bit of performance. Hair quality doesn't impact general visuals all that much, but it does affect the density of hair on some of the bosses. The cinematic through medium settings all feature more simulated hair strands. The higher the setting is, though even medium looks okay. Low seems to disable hair simulations and reverts to a more basic hair presentation. In the benchmark pass, I only saw about a 2% performance improvement lowering this setting at best. In the boss entrance you just saw, dropping hair quality from cinematic to medium improved performance by 7% on average and 23% for 1% lows, which is pretty significant and can affect the frame rate in those crucial bosses. I think high provides a nice balance here between quality and frame rate, with medium a good choice if you need more performance. Vegetation quality is a very simple setting. It affects how many trees, shrubs, and grasses are present in the

scene with higher settings rendering more vegetation for a denser presentation in Game World. While some parts of vegetation quality are controlled through other settings, this setting tends to have the biggest impact on the amount of vegetation seen in the world. What's important to note about this setting is that vegetation density starts to drop as soon as you change the setting from cinematic to very high, and by the time you get to high, the world is noticeably less dense, which explains some of the largest differences we saw between the basic presets earlier on medium and especially low. A lot of the vegetation has been stripped away, and that really hurts the visual experience. This setting is also reasonably taxing, though not to the degree of the Shadow setting, dropping from cinematic to very high, resting in a 3% performance uplift, and 5% moving to high. You can gain a few extra percentage points using the medium or low settings. In my opinion, this setting has a substantial impact on visual quality, so I would try to run this on cinematic where possible. If you want additional performance, the high setting is a good

compromise without really gutting the density of the world. Global illumination quality is the second most taxing setting in the game after the shadow setting. How influential this setting is depends heavily on the scene, but generally speaking, so long as you aren't using the low mode, the game looks pretty good. In this first scene, for example, the differences are pretty minimal—a few small changes to the shadowing around some foliage—but it's difficult to spot the differences unless you use the low mode, of course, which looks bad. In this second scene, the reduction in ambient occlusion and contact shadowing is more noticeable on the leaves on the ground when moving from cinematic to high, and the lack of global illumination for distant objects is very obvious in the medium mode. Here's another scene that shows how similar cinematic, very high, and high are; however, the medium setting is a step down, and low looks terrible. In fact, low completely changes the look of the game, making it look like an overcast outdoor scene rather than a dimly lit cave. In this next scene, the differences

between high and medium are more subtle, but the differences between very high and high are more noticeable. As we roll through some of these final examples, very high or cinematic do appear to be the most visually impressive modes, while high can either look very similar or reasonably different depending on how much distant Global illumination is used. Medium is a step down, and low shouldn't be used from a performance standpoint. The setting is quite taxing for people after the highest visuals. I'd consider it using very high instead of cinematic and benefiting from a 4% bump to Performance. High seems to be reasonably optimal with a 133% gain relative to cinematic, though visual quality is reduced a bit. Medium is great for those that need extra performance, delivering 22% better fps than cinematic. Reflection quality is interesting in that regardless of what setting you choose, screen space Reflections are enabled for larger bodies of water. This applies all the way down to the low setting, which in these conditions looks pretty much identical to cinematic. However, for smaller puddles and some other surfaces

EG wood Metals, those sorts of things. Reflection quality does play a role. The Cinematic and very high modes have stable, higher resolution, more accurate reflections on these surfaces. Switching to High drops the resolution noticeably and causes some visual artifacts, and then dropping to medium further reduces the accuracy of reflections. Low and medium look pretty similar. There's no setting that fully switches off reflections in general gameplay, and areas with few reflections, the impact of this setting is minimal, just a 1% reduction. Moving to high or medium in areas with significantly more reflections, this setting is heavier and can lead to a 7% improvement using high or an 8% improvement using medium. The quality of reflections on high doesn't look great, so I'd try to avoid this setting. However, if you want more performance, then using high does make sense. Black Myth Wukong also includes a motion blur setting, though disabling it has no impact on performance. This means motion blur is a personal preference type of setting. My opinion is that you should use frame generation instead of

motion blur if you want to simulate a smoother, higher frame rate experience, especially if you have a higher refresh rate display. The next question we need to answer is whether ray tracing in this game is worth using, and for this, I'm going to start with the performance evaluation on an RTX 470 Super and, by the looks of it, other modern Nvidia GPUs too. Enabling full ray tracing on either the low or medium settings only has a small impact on performance relative to the Cinematic mode. For example, using low only causes a 2% hit to performance, and medium is just a 6% hit. The very high setting is much more substantial and causes a 28% reduction in frame rate. This is because ray tracing replaces the two most taxing settings in the game: Shadows and Global illumination. Instead of using the extremely performance-intensive Lumin configuration that the developers have gone with, full ray tracing in these modes uses half-resolution raster path trace Global illumination and ray trace Shadows. Medium also enables half-resolution Reflections. So basically, the game

recovers a ton of performance. Disabling Lumen then uses that on RT instead. You can see this is the case when comparing rate tracing to the high preset. RT on low or medium with the high preset otherwise sees at least a 30% performance drop. Enabling it on very high, which doubles the resolution of each effect to full resolution and also adds RT core sticks, sees your frame rate hared so relative to more optimized configurations that aren't as taxing as the Cinematic preset. R Racing is still performance-intensive on Nvidia GPUs. On AMD GPUs, you can pretty much forget about using path tracing. Even using full rate tracing on low, the frame rate on my 7800 XT haved relative to the Cinematic preset and very high was laughably slow relative to the high preset. Path tracing resulted in at least a 70% performance drop, and even at 1440p using upscaling, frame rates were terrible. I believe this is almost entirely due to the use of rester Global illumination, which is enabled with all RT configurations. This

technique was developed by Nvidia and is optimized for their hardware. You can't disable this and only use RT shadows or reflections, which is disappointing as perhaps other hardware configurations could have run a more limited ray tracing setup. So, what impact does ray tracing have on the game's visuals? Well, it changes the lighting system substantially in most instances, improving the presentation and making the game look more accurate and realistic. Shadow quality is better with a higher resolution appearance, more natural soft falloff relative to the distance of the casting object, and it produces better shadow detail further into the distance. The quality of cinematic shadows is great, so the impact of ray-traced shadows ranges anywhere from not noticeable at all to a decent improvement relative to lower quality non-RT shadows. Ray tracing is a substantial gain. Global illumination is changed and generally appears more accurate. Some scenes look substantially better with more accurate ambient occlusion, more realistic lighting, better contact shadows, and greater depth to the scene that better mimics real life. In many instances, this makes the game look more

natural and leads to greater contrast. However, there are some scenes that are probably more accurate in terms of how the lighting is calculated but subjectively look worse in my opinion than the Cinematic preset without full ray tracing. For example, this scene is brighter and less moody using full ray tracing compared to the standard UE5 Lumen image. Generally though, path tracing has a noticeable positive impact on visuals, which we've also found to be the case looking at Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2. The improvements to both shadows and global illumination are accessible immediately from even the low ray tracing setting, while the very high mode is slightly more accurate and has a slightly higher resolution appearance than the medium and low modes in lighting. It's not substantial enough for that mode to be worth using purely for its improved lighting capabilities. The medium and very high modes enable ray trace reflections on half res and full res respectively. The pre-release build of the game I had access to currently has a bug where medium reflections are very blurry, and I'm told

this is not representative of the final game. Very high reflections are more accurate than cinematic screen space reflections and reflect more of the scene, including objects not in the field of view. However, even using the very high mode, these reflections can be grainier than the cinematic reflections, especially on rippling water, like with the non-ray traced reflection. Enabling RT reflections also improves reflections for some other surfaces throughout the game world. What I did notice, though, is that ray tracing on low actually has worse reflections than with ray tracing disabled. There are some situations where this configuration has no noticeable reflections where they are present without ray tracing, and there are other situations where the reflections are much worse and appear to be reflecting too much of the sky. This isn't the case in all scenes and could be a bug, but it's something to be aware of. Lastly, very high ray tracing also enables ray traced cor sticks, which can be visible in some shallow pools and puddles, but only has a small impact on

visual quality for the most part. I think if you were planning on using the highest cinematic preset on an Nvidia GPU, that using full ray tracing on medium makes sense. It's a small hit to performance for an improvement to lighting quality. Very high is hard to justify for all but the fastest GPUs. However, if you were looking for a more optimized experience and weren't just going to blast the top presets, the performance hit from enabling ray tracing is more significant, and it won't be a suitable choice for many mid-range GPU owners. At 1440p, we found that cards below the RTX 470 Super are not powerful enough to run this sort of configuration, even using DLSS upscaling and frame generation. So here are our optimized settings. The good news is that you can substantially improve performance without much impact on visuals through dropping just three settings. I'd recommend turning Shadow quality, Global illumination quality, and Hair quality down to high for gamers after a high-quality visual experience while leaving everything else on cinematic if you want.

additional performance lowering a range of other settings to high or medium is the best play while other settings have little performance impact and should remain on cinematic. If you want to use full Ray tracing, I'd recommend using our optimized quality settings and enabling ray tracing on medium, provided the blurry reflections are resolved in the retail build of the game. From a performance standpoint, using these optimized settings provides at least a 50% performance improvement relative to the Cinematic preset, at only an 8% cost relative to the high preset. If you want the more performance-oriented optimized settings, those provided greater than 80% more performance and sat between the included high and medium modes. However, relative to our optimized configuration, enabling ray tracing came with a 35% performance reduction. So, that takes a roughly 90 FPS configuration and makes it 60 FPS instead, or it brings 60 FPS down to near 40 FPS. Probably something only high-end Nvidia GPU owners would consider using. What these optimized settings do is lower the quality of Shadows and Global

illumination while maintaining the rich, dense Dynamic Game World offered through other cinematic settings. So, the lighting quality isn't quite as strong as you'd see from Mac settings, but it still provides most of the feel and design of the world. Relative to the high preset, you're getting a similar level of lighting quality with a substantial improvement to the world's density and dynamism, which can be restored to cinematic levels with only a small hit to performance. The Hub performance-optimized settings are a mixture of everything, including maximum textures and better level of detail than you'd see from the Medium preset. Shadows are also superior to medium in many respects. This looks like the high preset but with about a 10% performance improvement and a near 20% gain relative to our quality-optimized settings. Now, I've seen some criticism around Black Myth: Wukong that this game is unoptimized based on the performance seen in our GPU Benchmark video using the Cinematic preset. Personally, I don't feel like that's the case at all. This game has

significant scope for quality scaling with in-game settings allowing you to go as full on as path tracing or as dialed back as potato quality lighting. Yes, the cinematic preset is difficult to run, but that also brings with it visual benefits, and you can indeed achieve much better frame rates by adjusting relatively few settings. Having the ability to play an awesome-looking game on high-end hardware, a great-looking game on mid-range hardware, and a game that does run on low-end hardware is exactly what PC gamers should want. The high and even at times medium preset looks as good as the ultra preset in some other games, which is a good reminder that the name of the preset isn't really relevant, and gamers shouldn't be afraid of missing out on a great experience by using high instead of ultra or, in this case, cinematic. With that said, if you want the best visual experience this game has to offer, it is quite performance-intensive, and high-end hardware is required. The path tracing mode looks fantastic, but we're years away from that experience being viable.

on mainstream GPUs, there's a few other things that I've noticed about Black Myth Wukong based on my time actually playing the game. One is that this is a game that benefits significantly from not using upscaling or frame generation, at least when it comes to visuals. I suspect most people will use DLSS, FSR, or XCSS to actually play the game, but the density of the world, the heavy use of foliage and grass, and overall detail levels means that native rendering does look best. Using DAA, for example, is crisper, less blurry in motion, and less grainy. But in most configurations, this isn't feasible from a performance perspective. Similarly, while frame generation does smooth the visual presentation, and this helps the game look better when the base render rate is around 60 FPS, combat is relatively fast-paced, and with frame generation on, it creates a bit of grain and sizzling in motion. We didn't go into detail on upscaling or frame generation quality in this video, of course. We have some very detailed explanations of how

those things compare that you can check out right here on the channel. Now, I'm not saying for one second that you shouldn't use upscaling and frame generation in this game. I would recommend using both, depending on your base frame rate, and it's the way I personally prefer to play. But I think this is a good example of how when games start pushing the limits of visuals and creating these nice dense game worlds, they can benefit more from running natively. This game is going to look great on something like an RTX 6090 maxed out without upscaling, even better than it does now with upscaling tech in use. Secondly, there are a few notable omissions and areas game science could improve the PC experience. This game does not support HDR at all, at least in the preview build I played, and I reckon it would look even better with HDR on a proper HDR display. I'm sure someone will find a way to unlock HDR, given it's an Unreal Engine game and UE5 supports HDR, but it definitely needs to be updated to

support HDR on PC natively. The game is oversharpened in general and needs more control over the sharpness level. It's particularly problematic after chapter one. I also would have liked to see more control over individual ray tracing features and a high-quality texture pack, though the latter is probably a bit optimistic given that it means lots of extra development effort. All of the other improvements could easily be made through patches, though, and I hope to see them. As an Unreal Engine 5 game, there's also some degree of traversal stutter, even playing the game on high-end hardware. There is a shader compilation pass at launch, and I wouldn't say the game stutters persistently, but there's the occasional hitch as you move between areas. I doubt this is Game Science's fault, though; it just seems to be how Unreal Engine is in general. Though this is one of the best-looking games you can play on PC, and I've had a lot of fun playing it. The combat is very enjoyable, and there's a lot of interesting boss battles to tackle as you progress.

through the world while I did mostly focus on chapter one in the forest areas. There are many different biomes as well throughout the game, which bring a different style and keep things interesting. Some areas probably don't look quite as nice as the forests, but I'm sure you can say the same for most other games. There is always a variety of visual quality as you play most titles. So anyway, that's it for this black myth Wukong optimization guide. Hopefully, all of you that are playing this game right now or are just about to play black myth will benefit from this sort of guide. You should be able to get a pretty substantial performance improvement relative to cinematic by using these settings. And I know lots of people are just going to go in the game, crank it up to cinematic, be like, Oh my God, my frame rates, they're so bad. Well, there's a few settings you can tweak that does improve that substantially. So yeah, that's it for this one. Thanks for watching. If you do appreciate the testing, in-depth sort of

videos that we make here, like this one, then please do consider supporting us via Patreon or Flo plan. Links to those are on the description below, and you'll gain access to some cool perks and benefits like our Discord Community, monthly live streams. One of those is coming up very soon. We've got our BTS content, plenty of good stuff. So thanks for watching. I'll catch you in the next one. [Music] [Music]

Black Myth: Wukong Optimization, The Best Settings to Change on PC!

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