Here at Digital Foundry, we’ve already gone into depth on Black Myth: Wukong‘s high-end PC experience, with ‘full RT’ (ie path-traced) lighting – but the fact is that the vast majority of the audience will be using mainstream-level PC hardware. Thankfully, the game can scale and we’ve put together some optimised settings for you that allow you to enjoy a beautiful experience without being short-changed from the maxed out experience… well, the maxed out non-RT experience.
So, here’s the deal: our first order of business was to look at the ray tracing settings to see what level of scalability is there and ultimately, we came up empty. It’s all or nothing here: maxed out, you get a beautiful experience, but the manner of scaling on lower RT settings just doesn’t make sense. Drop down from max and the roughness cut-off on reflections along with specular elements in general are savagely pared back.
The issue is worse with water rendering, where the medium setting is denoising incorrectly with a horrible flickering, caustics are removed completely. Low RT settings in water have a poor fallback to cube-mapped reflections that actually look worse than the non-RT option. The medium setting is bugged and should be fixed, but right now, we can’t recommend anything other than maxing it out. Really, diffuse and specular global illumination, water caustics and shadows should be split out into different options.
