DF Weekly: a snippet of Black Myth: Wukong PS5 footage arrives

This week’s DF Direct ‘drops’ a little early owing to a somewhat busy and congested week for us, and our usual two-hour-long chat show begins with a look at the Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool – and the fact that (when we filmed, at least), the developer had not shown any video footage of the PlayStation 5 version in action. Reviewers were told not to expect PS5 code pre-launch. However, yesterday, a short snippet of gameplay captured from the console did appear online, so we scrambled to take a look at it and append some thoughts about it to our show.

Let’s talk about the footage itself, hailing from PlayStation China (though we picked it up from the developer’s feed, which linked to IGN China instead). First of all, there are clear issues with the quality of the footage. The appearance of developer IP addresses in the top-right may suggest that the PS5’s system level video recording system was used, which was then re-processed by YouTube’s systems, creating a very muddy picture, heavy on compression artefacts. Even so, we can see that the game is targeting 60fps, albeit with some heavy hits to frame-rate when screen-filling effects present on-screen. Black Myth: Wukong as presented here doesn’t have any screen-tearing.

Beyond that, it is difficult to tell you much more about the game when we have no context on how the clip was captured and what settings (assuming the console version has settings) it was using. To be honest, the murkiness of the footage has left me with more questions than answers – especially after carrying out performance analysis on the clip. It’s not easy to gauge frame-rate from lossy video, but we’ve done it in the past with streaming services and the technique is pretty straightforward and boils down to manually scrolling through the clip frame by frame and marking up duplicates. In the process, we got to see how the game looks from one frame to the next and there’s some evidence here to suggest that AMD FSR 3 frame generation is being used in this footage.

• 0:00:00 Introduction
• 0:01:48 News 01: Black Myth: Wukong benchmark drops
• 0:22:35 News 02: Zen 5 launch unravels
• 0:44:24 News 03: Switch 2 possibly “delayed” further into 2025
• 0:54:49 News 04: Unannounced game Deadlock hits 18,000 concurrent players
• 1:06:33 News 05: FF7 Remake trilogy third title to switch to UE5?
• 1:12:32 News 06: Man connects 444 consoles to one TV
• 1:20:39 News 07: Tango Gameworks acquired by Krafton
• 1:24:26 News 08: Forza Horizon 5 potentially headed to PS5
• 1:34:40 News 09: Valve plans to offer SteamOS to other handhelds
• 1:44:58 Supporter Q1: As Microsoft increasingly goes multiplatform, what’s the point of Xbox?
• 1:49:45 Supporter Q2: Should Microsoft be putting older exclusives on Switch?
• 1:52:10 Supporter Q3: What does the DF audience have to look forward to in 2025?
• 1:56:12 Supporter Q4: Which graphically intense ports should come to Switch 2?
• 2:00:10 Supporter Q5: What are some technical annoyances you have with modern gaming?
• 2:04:34 Supporter Q6: What is the best way to achieve good frame-rates for PS3 titles?

Despite the low quality, a kind of concertina strobing effect is seen when scrolling through the footage, particularly visible with post-process effects dominating the screen. Fast whip-pans on the camera show edge artefacts that present as ‘borders’ of a sort on the sides of the footage, but perhaps the strongest indicator that frame generation is being used comes down to the way particles animate. They are fully formed on one frame, then ghost into two separate images before resolving into one particle again on the following frame. A further piece of evidence is that the UI appears to noticeably animate at half-rate during the footage.

If this isn’t frame generation, I’d love to know why so many of the technology’s artefacts are presenting in this mini-clip, but we won’t find out for sure what the context is behind this video until we go hands-on with the game. At that point, we’ll also discover if there are quality and performance modes and whether frame generation (assuming it is frame generation) is a user toggle. And of course, crucially, we’ll actually be able to tell you about the quality of the game overall.

Before the gameplay clip emerged, I thought about attempting to get an idea of how the PS5 version could present by using Digital Foundry’s infamous ‘Frankenstein’s PC’. This is a Windows machine based on the AMD 4800S desktop kit – a micro ATX board built around the Xbox Series X CPU, running alongside the AMD Radeon RX 6700. In prior multi-platform tests, it has successfully delivered ballpark console performance and the results from the publicly available Black Myth: Wukong benchmark test are intriguing.

First of all, the caveats: based on the proliferation of foliage, we expect that this is a heavy scene from the actual game, but without reference to final code, it’s difficult to say just how representative it is. That said, I was able to run Black Myth: Wukong on our console surrogate PC at 4K output resolution using both FSR and TSR upscaling at performance and balanced mode. Balanced mode was uncomfortably close to 30fps at times, but performance mode provided a welcome buffer of around 20 percent more performance. This was on high settings, without ray tracing.

Looking to test out a potential 60fps performance mode (remember, this was before we saw the actual PS5 footage), 1440p resolution with FSR or TSR in performance – essentially upscaling from 720p – couldn’t quite achieve a locked 60fps output. However, despite looking blurry, it still looked fine, especially with Epic’s TSR upscaler. Given the choice for the console builds, I’d prefer to see Game Science use TSR (tests show nigh-on identical performance, with a tiny boost seen with TSR) but if FSR 3 frame generation is being used, it may well be an earlier build of it that requires FSR inputs. Even so, given the fact I tested on high settings, there may well be further scalability that could see improved results. I didn’t use frame generation at all in my tests, so if that is what PS5 is doing, I’ll be very interested to see why there is the need for it.

Answers will be coming soon though. As I write this, the PlayStation 5 version of Black Myth: Wukong unlocks in around 36 hours (3:00am BST on Tuesday) and bearing in mind the attention surrounding the game, we’ll be doing our best to get our coverage done as quickly as possible. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this week’s edition of DF Direct!