Black Myth: Wukong

Black Myth: Wukong is widely used as a GPU stress test because it ships with a free, standalone benchmark tool on Steam that runs the exact same built-in benchmark used inside the game. TechSpot praised this, saying they wish all developers offered such a tool, and noted the benchmark accurately represents in-game performance (aside from frame-generation figures overstating smoothness). Tom's Hardware likewise used the built-in benchmark, noting each run lasts about 145 seconds, which makes it easy to produce repeatable, comparable numbers across many cards.

The game is built on Unreal Engine 5 and leans heavily on modern rendering technology, making it a good showcase for a range of workloads. It uses UE5's Lumen and Nanite in its rasterization path, and as an Nvidia-sponsored title it adds a demanding 'Full Ray Tracing' (path-tracing) mode with low/medium/very-high options. Both TechSpot and Tom's Hardware describe it as brutally demanding at maxed settings: the cinematic preset roughly halves frame rates versus medium, and only the RTX 4090 could sustain 60 fps at 4K on the cinematic/high presets in their testing.

It also exercises the full modern upscaling and frame-generation stack, which is why reviewers use it to compare vendors. Tom's Hardware notes support for DLSS 3.7.1, FSR 3.1, and XeSS 1.3 (plus UE5's TSR), with frame generation for DLSS and FSR. Because it is Nvidia-promoted with an emphasis on ray tracing, reviewers found Nvidia RTX cards punch above their usual weight in RT while AMD and Intel cards fare better sticking to rasterization, making the game a useful test of ray-tracing/path-tracing capability across GPU brands. Tom's Hardware observed it did not exceed 8GB of VRAM in their runs, so it stresses raw shading and RT throughput more than memory capacity.

Reviewers deliberately vary settings for different goals: Tom's Hardware fixes upscaling at 67% render scale and tests medium, cinematic, and full-RT (low and very-high) at 1080p/1440p/4K to 'punish' GPUs, while recommending the High preset as the practical sweet spot for actual play. TechSpot tested five configurations across three resolutions on up to 43 GPUs using a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, including cinematic with 75% upscaling plus frame generation at very-high and medium ray tracing, and native-resolution runs at cinematic/high/medium.