DF-optimised: the best PC settings for Black Myth: Wukong

Here at Digital Foundry, we’ve already gone into depth on Black Myth: Wukong‘s high-end PC experience, with ‘full RT’ (ie path-traced) lighting – but the fact is that the vast majority of the audience will be using mainstream-level PC hardware. Thankfully, the game can scale and we’ve put together some optimised settings for you that allow you to enjoy a beautiful experience without being short-changed from the maxed out experience… well, the maxed out non-RT experience.

So, here’s the deal: our first order of business was to look at the ray tracing settings to see what level of scalability is there and ultimately, we came up empty. It’s all or nothing here: maxed out, you get a beautiful experience, but the manner of scaling on lower RT settings just doesn’t make sense. Drop down from max and the roughness cut-off on reflections along with specular elements in general are savagely pared back.

The issue is worse with water rendering, where the medium setting is denoising incorrectly with a horrible flickering, caustics are removed completely. Low RT settings in water have a poor fallback to cube-mapped reflections that actually look worse than the non-RT option. The medium setting is bugged and should be fixed, but right now, we can’t recommend anything other than maxing it out. Really, diffuse and specular global illumination, water caustics and shadows should be split out into different options.

Now, as you can see above, we did take a closer look at each and every setting in Black Myth: Wukong and we’ve actually come up with two different profiles for the game. Upon completing that, Digital Foundry contributor Mohammed Rayan handed in his work, stacking up the PS5 version against PC to get an idea of where the developers chose to make their own optimisation ‘nips and tucks’.

The basic idea of optimised settings is to claw back system resources without sacrificing too much of the game’s visual make-up at the high-end – and that’s where we sit with the ‘optimised high-end’ selection. On a dense, forest scene (albeit with no water), there’s a 48 percent improvement in frame-rate compared to the maxed out ‘cinematic’ mode without RT enabled.

However, Black Myth: Wukong is a very demanding game and even optimised settings may not be enough to keep you at an acceptably high frame-rate – we saw that on an RTX 2070 Super (which is broadly equivalent to today’s RTX 4060 desktop GPU), these selections can take you into the 40s and 50s at 1080p with DLSS quality mode. That’s daunting. However, by dropping global illumination and reflection quality down from very high to high, we got a 23 percent increase in frame-rate. And with that in mind, it’s perhaps not surprising that this is generally where we find Game Science’s settings choices for the PlayStation 5.

Beyond that, there are elements of the game that exhibit performance problems and where we’re entirely at the whim of the developers to improve the experience. The unfortunate reality is that Black Myth: Wukong does have both traversal stuttering on both PC and consoles, while shader compilation problems also rear their ugly head (on PC, not on PS5). Looking at the traversal stutters first, on a lower-end PC running the game at 60fps, you’re looking at 66ms and 33ms stutters on a Ryzen 5 3600 – noticeable, a bit frustrating to see, but we’ve seen a lot worse.

Shader compilation issues are more problematic, with regular stutters in the 100ms area on the Ryzen 5 3600. Black Myth: Wukong does have a shader precompilation burn at the beginning of the game, but our theory is that the process does not include all of the required shader permutations, meaning that the usual stutter crops up the first time certain effects are used (beyond that, they’re cached and won’t bother you again). Particle effects seem to be the biggest problem here. This problem was mitigated on later versions of UE5, but the problem with Black Myth: Wukong may be down to its use of the older Unreal Engine 5.0.

So, previously, we talked about the sub-optimal state of the PlayStation 5 version of the game – but based on what we’ve learned today, Game Science appear to have got its settings selection right (the exception being texture quality, which is of a bafflingly low quality). The issue really does seem to be down to performance target options: 30fps should be properly frame-paced to 33.3ms per frame, the balance mode would run better locked to 40fps on a 120Hz output, while sacrificing resolution in favour of higher frame-rate would help the performance mode in a way that the current frame generation option does not. We’re considering taking a look at that in more depth on our console-equivalent PC, but for now at least, mainstream PC users should hopefully get a good experience from our settings choices on this page.