Ever since its reveal in 2020, Black Myth: Wukong has been an alluring project. Developer Game Science has been surprisingly open in comparison to other AAA studios and the game's apparent ambitions have been reinforced with each and every press release: a hero-focused action game retelling the story of Journey to the West, and a graphical tour de force using the latest Unreal Engine features. In fact, on PC Wukong uses the Nvidia branch of UE5 to enable full ray tracing, promising an even more impressive presentation. With the full game in hand, it's time to see if Game Science has fulfilled the graphical promise of that first trailer, how the RT features work on PC, and what optimised settings can be used to deliver a smooth experience on a range of hardware. Enough monkey business then, let's get right into it.

From the moment the game starts up, it's clear that Game Science has delivered a level of graphical fidelity that surpasses that of the initial trailer. The dazzling intro to the game dazzles, with titanic mythical beings looming over you and an entire area replete with unique volumetric rendering that's unfortunately rare in the modern age.

With each and every dash, staff swipe and bit of movement, the main character and his nemesis distort and move the physical volume of fog that they find themselves in. Beyond Housemarque's Returnal and some legacy PhysX titles, real physicalised particles like this are rare, and Game Science made sure to use this GPU-intensive effect effectively to add a mystical flourish to game moments and character entrances.

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It began in 2013 with the arrival of Nvidia G-Sync - the first form of variable refresh rate (VRR) display technology. Rather than attempt to synchronise, or not synchronise GPU output with your screen, the host hardware took control - kicking off a new display refresh when the GPU was ready with a new grame. V-sync judder didn't happen, screen-tearing would (by and large!) disappear. FreeSync and HDMI VRR would follow, but essentially they all did the same thing - smoothing off variable performance levels and delivering a superior gameplay experience. But let's be clear: VRR is not a cure-all. It's not a saviour for poor game performance. It has its limits and it's important to understand them and in the process, we'll gain a better understanding of performance more generally - and why frame-rate isn't that important compared to other, more granular metrics.

Let's talk about VRR basics. Displays have a native refresh rate - whether it's 60Hz, 120Hz, 165Hz or whatever. Without VRR you have limited options for smooth, consistent play. First of all, there's the idea of matching game frame-rate to the screen's refresh rate. Every display refresh gets a new frame. The most popular example of this is the 'locked 60 frames per second' concept, where a new frame is generated every 16.7ms to match the refresh rate of a 60Hz screen - a truly tricky thing to deliver on consoles while maxing out their capabilities.

Secondly, you can ask your hardware to offer a clean divider of the refresh rate - the classic example being a 30fps game running on a 60Hz screen. In this case, every other refresh receives a new frame from the source hardware. There are issues with this, like ghosting, for example, but this is the classic compromise for maintaining consistency when unable to match the refresh rate.

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Doom: The Dark Ages is our first look at the latest version of the legendary id Tech engine, as the series seemingly moves from the relatively constrained battlescapes and glory kills of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal to something on an altogether grander scale for current-gen consoles and PC only. While the trailer contains less than two minutes of actual gameplay footage, there's still plenty to glean about The Dark Ages and its tech from what id has revealed thus far.

The first thing I noticed in the trailer was something I didn't expect for a Doom game: volumetric clouds. They're featured prominently in many shots of the trailer, with the most obvious shots being the intro shot of the burning citadel floating in the sky. Here, the clouds wreathing the structure show clear evidence of local self-shadowing, lighting from the sun and light transmission, visible on the clouds' fringed edges.

Later on, as the Doom Slayer is shot down planet-side, the clouds part around him - though it's likely that this is a VDB animation playback of some sort, rather than a physicalised volumetric simulation given the performance implications. Nonetheless, you can actually spot volumetric clouds throughout the trailer, often above mountains in the distance, and they sometimes seem to show evidence of movement and evolution - interesting stuff.

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Four years after its initial PS4 release, Sucker Punch's Ghost of Tsushima arrives on PC, ported by Nixxes Software. Initial impressions of the port were favourable, but having now spent around a week with the game we're able to give you a much more nuanced appraisal of the conversion, suggest some optimised settings and offer up those all-important PS5 comparisons.

This may be a new engine for Nixxes to deal with, but the overall framework of the game has much in common with its prior ports - which is generally a very positive thing. It means you get a settings menu that lets you tweak as you like, your changes reflected in the background in real-time - no restarts required! And as usual for Nixxes, there's support for dynamic resolution scaling and all major upscaling technologies, along with both FSR 3 and DLSS 3 frame generation (though the new FSR 3.1 spatial upscaling upgrades are not included). Nixxes has also liberated FSR 3 frame-gen from requiring FSR 2 spatial upscaling, which is a welcome change.

In terms of the quality of the upscalers, we see the usual hierarchy, though DLSS has some issues in this title with depth of field effects, with some off-putting jitter. This manifests itself with XeSS but to a lesser extent, while it's not a problem at all with FSR. It would be nice to see this remedied in due course.

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Unreal Engine 5 has reached a new milestone release, version 5.4. Alongside technology that sets the groundwork for future iterations of the engine, developer Epic Games is promising substantial performance improvements with better CPU utilisation, potentially solving a common bugbear we've seen on PC and consoles this generation. Of course, the new release also includes visual improvements, including to the Nanite geometry system and Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) upscaling. We've tested this latest engine revision to see how everything works and to get a sense of the kind of performance improvements that might be possible in the new version.

As stunning as it was, the first Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5.0 demo back in 2021 already exhibited the core performance issues that Epic is looking to address with 5.4. Moving through the Matrix demo city at speed on PlayStation 5 was enough to cause precipitous performance drops, as the engine grapples with loading in new areas. This is just a demo, of course, not a shipping game, but the sub-30fps readouts and frame-time stutters coupled with dynamic resolution scaling suggested a severe CPU limitation on console hardware. This was confirmed with the City Sample demo on PC in 2022, where simple CPU and GPU utilisation metrics show severe CPU bottlenecking even on powerful modern CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Logically, this makes sense. A lot of the most prominent UE5 features have significant CPU components, like MetaHuman, open world streaming, hardware ray tracing and Nanite, and therefore place a heavy demand on CPU performance. More critically, you tend to be limited by single-thread performance, so higher core count CPUs aren't able to meaningfully scale by spreading the load across multiple cores and threads. Given that both budget PCs and consoles tend to have core counts in the six to eight range and an increasing number of Unreal Engine 5 games are coming to market, that's a lot of untapped performance potential.

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Unreal Engine 5 has reached a new milestone release, version 5.4. Alongside technology that sets the groundwork for future iterations of the engine, developer Epic Games is promising substantial performance improvements with better CPU utilisation, potentially solving a common bugbear we've seen on PC and consoles this generation. Of course, the new release also includes visual improvements, including to the Nanite geometry system and Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) upscaling. We've tested this latest engine revision to see how everything works and to get a sense of the kind of performance improvements that might be possible in the new version.

As stunning as it was, the first Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5.0 demo back in 2021 already exhibited the core performance issues that Epic is looking to address with 5.4. Moving through the Matrix demo city at speed on PlayStation 5 was enough to cause precipitous performance drops, as the engine grapples with loading in new areas. This is just a demo, of course, not a shipping game, but the sub-30fps readouts and frame-time stutters coupled with dynamic resolution scaling suggested a severe CPU limitation on console hardware. This was confirmed with the City Sample demo on PC in 2022, where simple CPU and GPU utilisation metrics show severe CPU bottlenecking even on powerful modern CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Logically, this makes sense. A lot of the most prominent UE5 features have significant CPU components, like MetaHuman, open world streaming, hardware ray tracing and Nanite, and therefore place a heavy demand on CPU performance. More critically, you tend to be limited by single-thread performance, so higher core count CPUs aren't able to meaningfully scale by spreading the load across multiple cores and threads. Given that both budget PCs and consoles tend to have core counts in the six to eight range and an increasing number of Unreal Engine 5 games are coming to market, that's a lot of untapped performance potential.

Read more

Unreal Engine 5 has reached a new milestone release, version 5.4. Alongside technology that sets the groundwork for future iterations of the engine, developer Epic Games is promising substantial performance improvements with better CPU utilisation, potentially solving a common bugbear we've seen on PC and consoles this generation. Of course, the new release also includes visual improvements, including to the Nanite geometry system and Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) upscaling. We've tested this latest engine revision to see how everything works and to get a sense of the kind of performance improvements that might be possible in the new version.

As stunning as it was, the first Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5.0 demo back in 2021 already exhibited the core performance issues that Epic is looking to address with 5.4. Moving through the Matrix demo city at speed on PlayStation 5 was enough to cause precipitous performance drops, as the engine grapples with loading in new areas. This is just a demo, of course, not a shipping game, but the sub-30fps readouts and frame-time stutters coupled with dynamic resolution scaling suggested a severe CPU limitation on console hardware. This was confirmed with the City Sample demo on PC in 2022, where simple CPU and GPU utilisation metrics show severe CPU bottlenecking even on powerful modern CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Logically, this makes sense. A lot of the most prominent UE5 features have significant CPU components, like MetaHuman, open world streaming, hardware ray tracing and Nanite, and therefore place a heavy demand on CPU performance. More critically, you tend to be limited by single-thread performance, so higher core count CPUs aren't able to meaningfully scale by spreading the load across multiple cores and threads. Given that both budget PCs and consoles tend to have core counts in the six to eight range and an increasing number of Unreal Engine 5 games are coming to market, that's a lot of untapped performance potential.

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Path tracing? In Dragon's Dogma 2? The game shipped with ray-traced global illumination but a path tracer sits within Capcom's code - exposed thanks to a new mod for the PC version of the game. Graphics Suite Alpha, made by developer EXXXCellent, is available on Nexus Mods and includes path-traced lighting, shadows and reflections, all running in real-time. So, how does it look, how well does it run - and why exactly is it there in the first place?

To install the mod, you'll also need the most recent REFramework tool from Github, extract that into the Dragon's Dogma 2 install directory, then add in the mod's Lua script to the autorun folder. Go in-game, and you should have access to a bunch of additional options at the bottom of the REFramework overlay related to RT and path tracing.

With PT enabled, you'll see significantly more material and lighting detail versus the standard ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) with the option to use a per-pixel or four-samples-per-pixel level of granularity - each with a corresponding performance cost, of course. The standard RTGI has significantly less information to work with - one sample for every four pixels, so it has a lot more compromises compared to the 'ground truth' of path tracing.

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Machine learning-based image reconstruction has evolved into a genuinely game-changing technology - and what sets this apart from other PC features is that users can effectively mod improved versions of Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS into games with existing support, simply by swapping a .DLL file in the install directories. With that in mind, we wanted to use this unofficial modding technique to give a preview of sorts for the latest versions of DLSS and XeSS, to see what has changed.

The headlines are straightforward enough: The DLSS SDK has been updated to version 3.7 with a new reconstruction model called 'Model E', while XeSS has transitioned to version 1.3, promising greater quality and stability. We've covered DLSS across the years, but it's been some time since we first looked at XeSS prior to its launch. Back then, my conclusions were that XeSS when running on an Intel GPU produced quality similar to DLSS with only a few shortcomings, and did not suffer from issues that we have typically seen with FSR 2. However, XeSS's use of machine learning is interesting as it has multiple versions: it occupies a middle place between what AMD and Nvidia are doing. There's a full on ML implementation for its own XMX ML hardware, along with a DP4a path that allows the majority of modern GPUs to enjoy the benefits, with a small hit to quality .

And as XeSS has evolved, users of non-RTX graphics cards have discovered that the DP4a path, while heavier, has clear quality advantages over AMD's own FSR 2. However, at the same time, the simplified nature of the DP4a version means that few people have actually seen XeSS at its best. Based on my tests using Horizon Forbidden West, the hardware-based XMX version wins in quality on a few levels, but the biggest visible one is that particles do not have incessant trails following them like they have in the DP4a version. However, by swapping the existing XeSS .DLL file with the latest, there's clear improvement in this area. This is the sort of reporting that works best in the video format, so I entreat you to check out the embedded content below.

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Machine learning-based image reconstruction has evolved into a genuinely game-changing technology - and what sets this apart from other PC features is that users can effectively mod improved versions of Nvidia DLSS and Intel XeSS into games with existing support, simply by swapping a .DLL file in the install directories. With that in mind, we wanted to use this unofficial modding technique to give a preview of sorts for the latest versions of DLSS and XeSS, to see what has changed.

The headlines are straightforward enough: The DLSS SDK has been updated to version 3.7 with a new reconstruction model called 'Model E', while XeSS has transitioned to version 1.3, promising greater quality and stability. We've covered DLSS across the years, but it's been some time since we first looked at XeSS prior to its launch. Back then, my conclusions were that XeSS when running on an Intel GPU produced quality similar to DLSS with only a few shortcomings, and did not suffer from issues that we have typically seen with FSR 2. However, XeSS's use of machine learning is interesting as it has multiple versions: it occupies a middle place between what AMD and Nvidia are doing. There's a full on ML implementation for its own XMX ML hardware, along with a DP4a path that allows the majority of modern GPUs to enjoy the benefits, with a small hit to quality .

And as XeSS has evolved, users of non-RTX graphics cards have discovered that the DP4a path, while heavier, has clear quality advantages over AMD's own FSR 2. However, at the same time, the simplified nature of the DP4a version means that few people have actually seen XeSS at its best. Based on my tests using Horizon Forbidden West, the hardware-based XMX version wins in quality on a few levels, but the biggest visible one is that particles do not have incessant trails following them like they have in the DP4a version. However, by swapping the existing XeSS .DLL file with the latest, there's clear improvement in this area. This is the sort of reporting that works best in the video format, so I entreat you to check out the embedded content below.

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Alan Wake 2 was one of the most visually stunning games of 2023 - but also one of the most demanding for older hardware. Owing to its use of DX12 Ultimate mesh shaders, the game could run on older hardware but often delivered an unplayable experience, especially on Nvidia's GTX 10-series GPUs built on the Pascal architecture. This is an issue because so many of them are still in use: around nine percent of the Steam Hardware Survey's GPUs are 10-series cards. Last week, Remedy approached us with the chance to preview a PC patch going live on March 6th, which radically improves matters for Pascal users. At the same time, it's a golden opportunity for us to revisit Remedy's other work on the game since launch.

Nvidia's GTX 1060 remains one of the oldest and popular GPUs still in use, so it's a good initial focus for this piece. Its lack of mesh shader support is its undoing in Alan Wake 2. Mesh shaders give developers greater control over how much geometry is rendered on screen at any given moment, potentially allowing for much greater level of detail. Alan Wake 2 is a mesh shading showcase, with some incredible, highly detailed assets that look great viewed from far away or in extreme close-up.

The game does function on GPUs that don't support mesh shaders, but poor performance and visual errors are the problem: the GTX 1060 at 1080p on FSR 2 quality mode, married up with PS5's performance mode quality presets delivers a game typically running under 60fps, more usually hitting circa 15fps. Game frame-rate is so low, even game speed and audio playback are compromised.

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Nvidia recently released a driver enabling RTX Video HDR - a driver side tool that automatically converts SDR video into HDR, with the help of real-time machine learning on an RTX GPU. Enable it and YouTube videos in SDR present convincingly as HDR, breathing new life into them. However, modder 'emoose' discovered something more within the driver - the ability to apply this to virtually any game. In effect, Nvidia has been working on its own, ML-based version of Microsoft's AutoHDR. We've tried it and it's simply stupendous.

To get it working, you need to download the NV TrueHDR mod from Nexusmods. Then, open up the provided .exe file. This brings up a command prompt. From here, you either type in the filename of the game executable you want to target, or better yet, simply drag and drop that .exe into the command prompt window and hit ENTER. From there, you choose your quality level and you're good to go. Your chosen game now presents in HDR.

So, why even use this in the first place when Windows 11 ships with AutoHDR, which basically does the same job? Put simply, RTX HDR is the superior option in virtually every way. AutoHDR only works on selected, whitelisted DX11 and DX12 games, while RTX HDR supports everything natively from DX9 onwards - and there are a lot of fantastic DX9 games that can benefit. But with control panel tweaks and help from other compatibility tools, you can go further - right back to adding HDR support of sorts to 3DFX Glide titles. I even get HDR working in the PS3 emulator RPCS3, allowing me to play an emulated version of Killzone 2 in HDR to convincing effect.

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Nvidia recently released a driver enabling RTX Video HDR - a driver side tool that automatically converts SDR video into HDR, with the help of real-time machine learning on an RTX GPU. Enable it and YouTube videos in SDR present convincingly as HDR, breathing new life into them. However, modder 'emoose' discovered something more within the driver - the ability to apply this to virtually any game. In effect, Nvidia has been working on its own, ML-based version of Microsoft's AutoHDR. We've tried it and it's simply stupendous.

To get it working, you need to download the NV TrueHDR mod from Nexusmods. Then, open up the provided .exe file. This brings up a command prompt. From here, you either type in the filename of the game executable you want to target, or better yet, simply drag and drop that .exe into the command prompt window and hit ENTER. From there, you choose your quality level and you're good to go. Your chosen game now presents in HDR.

So, why even use this in the first place when Windows 11 ships with AutoHDR, which basically does the same job? Put simply, RTX HDR is the superior option in virtually every way. AutoHDR only works on selected, whitelisted DX11 and DX12 games, while RTX HDR supports everything natively from DX9 onwards - and there are a lot of fantastic DX9 games that can benefit. But with control panel tweaks and help from other compatibility tools, you can go further - right back to adding HDR support of sorts to 3DFX Glide titles. I even get HDR working in the PS3 emulator RPCS3, allowing me to play an emulated version of Killzone 2 in HDR to convincing effect.

Read more