Black Myth: Wukong came in and shattered everyone’s expectation on how good it actually is. Being crowned as China’s first AAA release is already an honor in it of itself but it also holds the title for being one of the fastest selling video games of all time with 10 million copies sold within just 3 days. It has been a critical, commercial, and cultural success to say the least. Of course, you’d want to play one of the best games of the year in the most optimal conditions. Having experienced the game on PC with maxed out settings, we’ve had nothing but a buttery smooth experience. Black Myth: Wukong deserves to be played at its best and NVIDIA is doing wonders to make sure of it.
Black Myth: Wukong is pushing the boundaries of what players can expect from an action RPG. Central to its incredible visuals and immersive gameplay is NVIDIA, providing cutting-edge tools to deliver the best possible gaming experience. With technologies like full ray tracing and DLSS 3, NVIDIA has enabled Black Myth: Wukong to achieve new levels of realism and performance.
Revolutionizing real-time graphics with full ray tracing
Traditionally, full ray tracing, or path tracing, has been a staple of visual effects in film and television, creating visuals that are close to what reality is. However, bringing this level of detail to real-time video games has always been a challenge due to its heavy demands on GPU power. With NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPUs, which are equipped with RT Cores and accelerated by NVIDIA DLSS 3’s AI technology. These innovations make it possible for games to feature full ray tracing in real-time, even at high frame rates.
In Black Myth: Wukong, full ray tracing is used to simulate light throughout entire scenes accurately, creating an impressive level of detail. With NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series and DLSS 3, players can experience the game with full ray tracing enabled, running at 60+ FPS.
I played through the game on an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X with a 4070 GPU build and I was glued to the screen with how smooth it all ran. Even in the more intense moments, to which there are plentiful in this game, I didn’t experience any significant chugs in performance. I was able to maintain a steady 80-100+ fps. This is all the more impressive considering prior to Black Myth: Wukong, the developers at Game Science were primarily focused on mobile games.
Achieving realistic lighting and reflections
One of the standout features of NVIDIA’s technology in Black Myth: Wukong is the implementation of multi-bounce ray-traced indirect lighting. This allows light to bounce up to two times throughout the game’s environments, resulting in more realistic indirect lighting and shadows. Traditional methods such as screen space reflections, screen space ambient occlusion, and existing global illumination solutions have been replaced by a unified algorithm that delivers more accurate and natural lighting.
The result is a game world that feels incredibly immersive, with reflections that capture even the smallest details. Puddles and other reflective surfaces now offer mirror-like clarity, displaying the surrounding environment with stunning accuracy. And the same applies with how the lighting bounces off of the already impressive looking character models.
Overcoming the challenges of particle rendering
Rendering particle systems in games with ray tracing has always been a challenging task, due to the unique characteristics of particles. Particles are often semi-transparent, come in various shapes and sizes, and can be difficult to capture accurately in real-time. Moreover, this system typically involves a large number of random elements, which can strain performance when using conventional ray tracing methods.
In Black Myth: Wukong, NVIDIA has introduced a new technique that employs two-level ray tracing to render order-independent transparencies for large sets of particles. This approach allows the game to efficiently render its particle systems in real-time, particularly during intense combat sequences, and trust me, there are a lot of them. This adds so much more spectacle to the action which is great considering that most of what you’ll be doing is combat.
With the launch of Black Myth: Wukong, NVIDIA is once again raising the bar for graphics and performance. By leveraging the power of the RTX 40 series and the AI-driven capabilities of DLSS 3, NVIDIA is enabling developers to create visually spectacular games that are both beautiful and responsive.
And if you think you don’t have the rig powerful enough to run the game, you can also play Black Myth: Wukong with GeForce NOW, NVIDIA’s cloud gaming service. Even on lower spec devices, you can enable RTX, DLSS, and RTX ON. Black Myth: Wukong is a strong contender for 2024 game of the year. Make sure you don’t miss out.