Black Myth: Wukong is an impressive game from a technical standpoint, especially on PC where it delivers sumptuous visuals despite stutter and other performance issues. The PS5 version of the game offers a chance for developers Game Science to offer a more curated experience, yet baffling design choices and some visual cutbacks detract from what is otherwise a gripping game.
Those design choices start with the game’s modes, which come in three familiar flavours: quality, balance and performance. These three modes seem to offer nearly identical settings, with similar shadows and texture resolution, so the primary differences here come in terms of resolution and frame-rate targets.
The quality mode is perhaps the most straightforward, with roughly 1440p internal resolutions (we measured 1224p to 1584p) upscaled to 4K with FSR 3. This looks convincingly 4K-like in stills, but can come undone in motion – something that’s traditionally not FSR’s strong suit.
This is exacerbated by both the setting of the game – which features lots of transparencies like furry bosses – and dithered post-processing effects that make the game look speckly and messy in motion. Motion blur makes things even worse, but even with it disabled you’ll still notice issues with post-processed distortion effects on weapon hits.
Quality mode seems like it might want to target 30fps, but instead it tends to fluctuate between 31 and 36fps – truly bizarre. The frame-rate cap here either isn’t working, or is working in an extremely strange way.
The balance – not balanced – mode is next, and seems to use a 1080p internal resolution without upsampling or dynamic resolution. That gives it a softer resolve, with less visible detail and even worse dithering issues that remind me of halftone comic books. This mode targets 45fps within a 60Hz container, a kind of frame delivery no man’s land that reliably delivers judder as the game alternates between long and short frame-times. The only other time we’ve seen this is in the truly horrible port of Arkham Asylum in the Return to Arkham Collection on Xbox One X, and it makes just as little sense here.
Performance mode is even weirder, as it uses the same fixed 1080p internal image, but the image has an incredibly strong sharpening filter that makes it look extremely crunchy, with a deep-fried look. Performance mode is also the only mode to use FSR 3 frame generation, which allows it to target 60fps – and achieve it most of the time, despite some (better-than-PC) traversal stutters and hard drops to 40fps in demanding scenes.