Black Myth: Wukong Gets Extensive Preview of NVIDIA RTX Effects and Performance

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.

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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,