Running Black Myth Wukong on PC: What Actually Happens at Ultra Settings
I spent about forty hours pushing the game through its highest fidelity options on a rig with an RTX 4090 and 64GB of DDR5. The results weren't what I expected, and honestly some of the tradeoffs are worth knowing before you dig in. The game ships with a built-in benchmark that runs through a specific combat encounter across three difficulty tiers. That's the official way to gauge performance, but it's also somewhat misleading. The benchmark sequence uses characters with simpler AI and doesn't represent the worst-case scenarios you'll hit in actual exploration or boss fights. My numbers from the benchmark tool came in around 142 fps average at 4K with ultra settings and frame generation enabled. Without frame generation, it dropped to about 68 fps. Those are steady numbers. Real gameplay was another story entirely.
The first thing I noticed was VRAM behavior. The game loads texture sets aggressively, and even on the 4090's 24GB, I saw spikes up to about 22GB during certain transitions between areas. This isn't a bug so much as a design choice by Game Science. They're streaming high-resolution assets on demand, and sometimes demand outpaces the GPU's ability to swap things in and out smoothly. There's a specific issue I ran into around the second half of Chapter 3 where I kept getting stutters that had nothing to do with average framerate. The drops would happen when entering new combat arenas, and they lasted about one to two seconds each. I eventually traced it to the ambient occlusion setting. Turning SSAO down to HBAO+ cut those stutters nearly entirely while only dropping visual quality by a marginal amount you'd barely notice in actual play. This was counterintuitive for me because I assumed ambient occlusion would be cheap. It turns out the game's implementation of SSAO is more expensive than its ray-traced reflections, which surprised me. Here's the thing most people miss about pushing this game to ultra. It's not a linear cost curve. Jumping from high to ultra doesn't cost you twenty percent more performance, it costs you roughly sixty percent. The ultra preset enables a combination of screen-space reflections, volumetric fog, and high-resolution shadow maps simultaneously, and those three features compound their cost rather than adding independently.
I tested this methodically across five separate builds with different GPU configurations. The results showed diminishing returns kicking in hard past the 1440p resolution mark. At 4K ultra with frame generation, you're spending a lot of GPU headroom on features that don't always translate to perceptible visual improvement, especially on monitors with standard refresh rates rather than 240Hz displays. The audio implementation is worth mentioning briefly. The spatial audio system handles weapon impacts and environmental ambience separately, and at ultra settings the audio processing load becomes noticeable on lower-tier CPUs. I experienced this on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D where the audio thread would spike to near one hundred percent utilization during dense combat sequences with multiple enemies. Switching to a Ryzen 9 7950X resolved it completely, but that's a significant upgrade just for audio handling. If you're looking to download or obtain the game, it's available through Steam and the Epic Games Store. There's no standalone benchmark tool separate from the in-game options menu. The benchmark runs as part of the main campaign progression, so you need to complete the first boss fight before it unlocks.
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The optimization profile saved by Game Science's engineers is genuinely impressive given the scope of the project, but it's not without its compromises. The dynamic resolution scaling kicks in aggressively during heavy particle effects, and the scaling factor can drop as low as sixty percent of native resolution in the worst cases. This becomes more apparent when you're recording gameplay footage rather than just playing through the game. I'd recommend running the ultra preset but then manually adjusting two settings: shadow map resolution down to medium and ambient occlusion to HBAO+. The visual difference is minimal, but the performance gain averages around eighteen to twenty-two percent across most hardware configurations. This worked consistently across my testing environment and didn't introduce any new artifacts or flickering issues. The game does support DLSS 3.5 with frame generation on NVIDIA cards and FSR 3 as a fallback. The quality difference between DLSS and FSR in this particular game is substantial, and DLSS tends to handle edge cases better, particularly around transparent surfaces and thin geometry like the branches and foliage you see throughout the forest chapters.
One more thing about memory management. The game doesn't fully release texture data when you travel between areas, which means a fresh playthrough will show better performance than a save file loaded after twenty hours of exploration. The VRAM accumulation is gradual but real. I measured about a three hundred megabyte increase in baseline VRAM usage after extended sessions, and that growth never reversed itself until a full game restart.
