Black Myth: Wukong demolishes Nvidia RTX 4090 without DLSS

Monkey hair graphics require gorilla GPU performance.

Black Myth Wukong.

Black Myth: Wukong compatibility and performance benchmark tool puts Nvidia’s RTX 4090 to its knees. Launching next week, the game seems exceptionally hard to run at max settings.

Game Science, developer of Black Myth: Wukong, has released a benchmarking tool on Steam for those who want to check their PC’s readiness for the upcoming action RPG. Compusemble on YouTube put an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 graphics card to the test to see what it takes to run this game at max settings. The short answer is you better wait for the RTX 5090 if you prefer a native 4K experience.

But jokes aside, the game is so demanding that even RTX 4090, with all its might, was only enough to deliver around 22fps at 4K with DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing). To unlock more fps, you must inevitably use DLSS upscaling, or better yet, Frame Generation.

When doing so, the game becomes much more playable, reaching 40fps average using DLSS 75%, 57fps with DLSS 50%, and 65fps with DLSS 75% plus Frame Generation. Not bad, especially since the minimum frame rate remains stable. That said, don’t let this scare you, as the game is listed with a GTX 1060 and RX 580 for minimum specs, so you can probably play it if you lower the settings.

Seeing this, I was intrigued enough to download the benchmark, only to get humiliated with an 11fps average at 1440p on my Radeon RX 7900 XT. Frame Generation did help increase frame rates to 20-ish, though at the price of ghosting and artefacts. Ray Tracing remains Radeon’s Kryptonite, unfortunately. Now I feel the need to upgrade my GPU.

Black Myth Wukong Benchmark.

While the game is undoubtedly beautiful, graphicly speaking, it seems a bit of a stretch to ask for this much performance. Perhaps the game still needs some time in the oven for further optimisation. What is sure is that if this benchmark represents the real gaming experience, this is what you will get since the game is scheduled for next week, on August 20.