Our graphics settings guide for Black Myth: Wukong on PC

Black Myth: Wukong is finally here and has been breaking all kinds of records upon launch. After shooting Steam’s bandwidth usage up to new heights thanks to preloads, the game overtook Cyberpunk 2077 as the single-player title with the most concurrent players of all time. With all that initial hype, we decided to check out the game for ourselves and put together a guide to the best graphics settings.

In this guide, we’ll be taking a look at the game’s performance on one of our testing rigs, adjusting settings to find the best balance of performance and visuals. Don’t worry if you don’t have the same hardware though, as we’ll be covering something for lower-end systems too, extracting the best performance possible while remaining relatively balanced.

How we picked the best graphics settings for Black Myth: Wukong

One of the best ways of testing your system on Black Myth: Wukong is by checking out the free benchmarking tool, released just ahead of the game itself. This gives you a great understanding of how it will perform on your system and saves you from committing to a full-size game download just to find out it’s unplayable.

We quickly discovered that the game isn’t exactly the easiest out there to run, especially with our 4K target. Using one of the rigs in our testing lab, we opted for some high-end hardware in order to push the game to its limits and test out every feature we could, including an RTX 4080 Super (which is what we rated as the best GPU for Black Myth: Wukong). See a list of specs in our rig just below:

Best settings for our RTX 4080 Super gaming PC

Starting with the best settings for our high-end gaming setup, we could afford to push the graphics pretty high, but it still struggled to push high framerates when playing on the very highest settings. However, there is a fine balance to be found here, especially since we don’t desperately need the FPS count going into the hundreds for a game like Black Myth: Wukong.

After running the benchmark test of these settings, we averaged 89 FPS with ray tracing on. Luckily, there’s plenty of breathing room if you want to raise that number higher, particularly with graphics settings such as Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and of course ray tracing.

Best settings for a low-end system

For those of you with a more budget setup, we suggest dropping those graphics options way down. You can drop to the lowest preset if you want to make things quick and simple, but we’ve done some further tinkering to try and find the best. Feel free to adjust settings to your liking, as this serves as a rough guide – not every gaming PC is the same after all. Settings that will affect your framerate the most include Display Resolution, Super Resolution, Frame Generation, and Full Ray Tracing.

How to optimize Black Myth: Wukong & boost FPS

If you’re struggling with stuttering or low FPS, reference the best settings for low-end systems above, which should provide a balance of visual fidelity and performance – leaning more towards the latter. Be sure to read through our Black Myth: Wukong stuttering on PC guide as well. We also have a guide on how to fix game crashes if you so need it.

Outside of the in-game settings, there are a few things you can do to boost your FPS and generally optimize your system for the job. Here are a few general tips and tricks that can come in handy for any title, not just Black Myth:

• Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date. First and foremost, updating GPU drivers (whether you’re on AMD, Nvidia, or Intel) is an important part of ensuring you have the best support possible. This is highly relevant for new releases, as driver-based fixes are most common early in the game’s post-launch development.
• Turn on V-Sync. For a single-player experience like this, you don’t necessarily need to push for the highest framerate possible, so syncing to the same as your display’s refresh rate will ensure smoother performance. You can use the in-game V-Sync setting to do this, but we’d instead recommend FreeSync or G-Sync implementation if your monitor supports it.
• Play on a lower game resolution than us. Yes, we tested the game at 4K, but this will be out of reach for most systems. If you happen to have multiple monitors with different resolutions, we’d recommend opting for a 1440p or 1080p display to aid performance while playing on native resolution.

Should I use ray tracing in Black Myth: Wukong?

As expected, we found ray tracing to be one of the biggest performance differentiators in Black Myth: Wukong. We’d only recommend using ray tracing if you have the hardware to back it up – such as one of the latest Nvidia RTX graphics cards. We used the RTX 4080 Super in our tests, yet still opted for the medium ray tracing setting due to how demanding it was on the system. This, among other small setting tweaks, helped bring the average FPS from around 60 up to just under 90.

Final word

That concludes our guide to the best graphics settings for Black Myth: Wukong. Hopefully, you can walk away with a good idea of which settings are worth tinkering with in terms of performance gains and losses. The game will be demanding if you wish to play at a high resolution like us, but there’s plenty to play around with if your framerate is suffering.

We’ve also seen examples of the game running pretty well on the ASUS ROG Ally X, a gaming handheld. Overall, the game offers all the modern options you’d expect, including the full DLSS 3 suite and upscaling options via FSR and XeSS.