With game reviews of Black Myth: Wukong finally out (including ours), NVIDIA is also taking the opportunity to share all the details of the game's full ray tracing implementation ahead of the launch on Tuesday 20.
First and foremost, thanks to multi-bounce ray-traced indirect lighting, natural colored light bounces up to twice throughout Black Myth: Wukong, creating more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion. A unified algorithm provides more accurate lighting of scenes and objects, making each scene as immersive as possible.
Compared to screen space reflections, ray traced reflections more closely mirror their surroundings, include bounced details, and are rendered at full resolution, accentuating the world and enhancing immersion. As seen in the comparison below provided by NVIDIA, still puddles offer a mirror-like surface of the surrounding area with greater detail when ray tracing is enabled.
NVIDIA also revealed to have worked with Game Science to implement a world-first technique called ray traced particle reflections in Black Myth: Wukong. It renders order-independent transparencies for large sprite sets using two-level ray tracing, efficiently rendering the game's particle system in real-time reflections. You can see in the comparison below that fire is not reflected at all when ray tracing is disabled.
Ray traced caustics are not unheard of in games, but they are still very rare. This technology simulates the real-world effect of light rays being reflected and refracted by water, curved surfaces, and objects, creating unique light patterns on nearby surfaces such as riverbeds. Once again, ray tracing improves realism and immersion in Black Myth: Wukong.
Last but not least, the game supports ray traced shadows, which add a pleasing richness to the fantasy environments with contact hardening and softening, self-shadowing, and higher levels of detail free of aliasing. Nearby objects project full and grounded shadows, and even fine details of distant and nested structures can be resolved for a more realistic image. Check out the comparison below.
NVIDIA also offered a preview of the game's performance. According to the benchmarks shared, owners of the most powerful graphics card, the GeForce RTX 4090, can run the game at 4K with DLSS Super Resolution set to Performance Mode, DLSS Frame Generation enabled, and full ray tracing set to the maximum while nearly reaching 100 FPS. The RTX 4080 SUPER achieves 74 average FPS, while the 4070 Ti SUPER registered 66 FPS in the test.
The Game Ready driver will be distributed next week, presumably before the official launch. As a reminder, the Black Myth: Wukong GeForce RTX 40 Series Bundle can be purchased until August 20 (the release day). If you do not own a powerful enough PC, there's always the GeForce NOW option for cloud streaming.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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