I tried the new Black Myth: Wukong benchmark and was pleasantly surprised by the results on my aging PC

A new official Black Myth: Wukong PC benchmark tool has been released by Game Science, the developer of the highly-anticipated upcoming soulslike action game. The tool evaluates system compatibility ahead of the game’s launch on August 20.

Available as a free download on Steam, the benchmark comes in at just under 8GB and contains a brief scene from the world of the game. Like other benchmark tools, this scene is rendered in real time, using either a variety of preset options or the specific graphics settings of your choice, and is followed by a screen that shows your overall performance results.

I was eager to try it for myself and, as it takes just a couple of minutes to complete, I’ve spent a little bit of time playing around with it. Although my current PC isn’t too shabby, it’s still a couple years old now and has struggled to run many similar recent games including Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and Remnant 2.

Given the fact that Black Myth: Wukong is being developed in Unreal Engine 5 and looks absolutely stunning in every trailer that we’ve seen so far, with high-fidelity visuals and plenty of intensive graphical effects, I’ve been pretty worried that it wouldn’t run too well on my machine. Luckily, this benchmark has put those fears to rest with some very reassuring results.

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Black Myth: Wukong Benchmark results — Benchmark results on the high preset(Image credit: Game Science)

Running at the recommended high preset (which makes use of FSR super resolution sampling by default) at 1080p resolution, my PC averaged 89fps throughout the scene. This included peaks of 102fps in less busy moments, plus a few barely noticeable dips to 23fps. On the whole, brilliant performance and certainly better than I was expecting given my more budget-friendly Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU.

In fact, performance remained uniformly excellent even as I enabled ray tracing. In that same high preset with ray tracing enabled and set to medium, frame rates averaged 54fps with almost no noticeable drops. Lower performance than before, but still comfortably playable and with a noticeable boost to the quality of reflective surfaces like the water in rivers.

While this is definitely a good sign and suggestive of a high-quality PC port, these results should still be taken with a grain of salt. As noted on the benchmark’s store page, “the complexity and variability of gaming scenarios” means that the “benchmark results may not fully represent the actual gaming experience and final performance.”

If you’re not able to achieve your desired performance in the PC benchmark tool, it’s worth bearing in mind that Black Myth: Wukong will also be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and Xbox Series S.