This new game will make your gaming PC sweat

Black Myth: Wukong is coming out next week, but ahead of the game’s release, developer Game Science has put out a dedicated benchmark tool. The free app, which is available on Steam now, will push even the best graphics cards to their limits, and I took it out for a quick spin to see how demanding the game really is.

The short answer is extremely demanding. As you can see from my initial run below, I was only able to achieve an average of 22 frames per second (fps) in the benchmark at 4K with maxed-out settings. That’s with the most powerful gaming hardware available right now, pairing an RTX 4090 GPU with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

That may seem way too low, but Black Myth: Wukong includes path tracing. Native performance, especially at 4K, is on the level of a game like Alan Wake 2. Game Science clearly intends players to use some form of upscaling and frame generation in the game. It supports DLSS 3, FSR 3, XeSS, and Unreal Engine’s own TSR. After turning on DLSS 3 to a 60% render resolution (Balanced mode) and flipping on frame generation, I achieved a much better result.

This is a scripted benchmark, and although Game Science says it should represent your expected performance, variability in configurations and gameplay scenarios might lead to different results in the actual game. In a post announcing the benchmark, the developer says the results are being collected to help the development team identify potential issues before the game’s release on August 20.

The benchmark is separate from the main game, and you don’t need to purchase the game to download the benchmark tool. If you’re interested, I’d highly recommend downloading the benchmark to see how your PC holds up. The game is extremely demanding as my results show, but the benchmark tool gives you full access to the graphics settings, including DLSS 3, FSR 3, XeSS, and TSR.

Despite being so demanding, Black Myth: Wukong has relatively tame system requirements, as you can see above. Game Science says you can get by with a GTX 1060 if you turn down your settings, which is shocking. At the high end, you’ll need an RTX 4080 Super, which isn’t surprising. During my runs, Black Myth: Wukong sucked down 13.5GB of VRAM, and the RTX 4080 Super comes with a 16GB pool to satisfy the demands of the game.

I’ll be running more graphics cards through the benchmark leading up to the game’s release, testing various settings and configurations to see what you need for stable performance. From my initial impressions, however, it looks like Black Myth: Wukong is stable and comes with a lot of performance headroom through the graphics menu. We’ll see if that impression holds up when the game proper is here.