Black Myth: Wukong - (Auto/RTX) HDR Optimized Settings

The game is NOT using/applying Xbox, Playstation or PC HDR Calibration app settings.

Currently the game has no native HDR implementation and relies on AutoHDR or RTX HDR on PC (for a live SDR-to-HDR conversion) but due to its popularity I still decided to provide some optimizations for the best visual and performance rendition on both consoles and PC.

First of all, even in SDR the game suffers from elevated black levels with its default in-game Brightness settings (of 50) so the first thing to do is to adjust that slider for your TV:

On a calibrated LG OLED, I found that 25 is a good value.

After that make sure you're using AutoHDR (on Xbox in the future) or even better RTX HDR (on PC with an NVIDIA RTX card) for an SDR-HDR upconversion done by hardware AI acceleration.

On PS5 you could force-enable HDR system-wide, but this won't be using any hardware AI acceleration but just "stretching" SDR inside a much wider HDR container looking worse than native SDR in my opinion, so I don't recommend that there.

Considering the big success of the game, hopefully a native HDR10 implementation will be added in the future on all platforms (and I will update this article accordingly).

PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATIONS

The game is very heavy on all platforms as it uses an older Unreal Engine 5 version fully loaded with features including Nanite, Lumen and Full RT (or Path Tracing) on PC.

Here you can find some suggestions for having the best performance possible without sacrificing visual quality too much, depending on your platform.

• On Consoles: avoid the 30fps "Quality" mode in favor of the "Balanced" mode if you have a 120hz + VRR display (which will result in a reconstructed 4K resolution starting from an internal res around 1080p using AMD FSR2 @ 40-45fps average) or "Performance" mode if you have a 60hz display (which will hover around 60fps but at Dynamic 1080p with no FSR2 involved)
  

• On PC: the game will run noticeably better with NVIDIA RTX cards compared to AMD cards, so the first thing to do in the first case is to replace the default DLSS .dll files (Upscale, Frame Generation & Ray Reconstruction) with the most updated ones along with applying all my other suggestions in the my PC Optimization Guide .
  
  Then if you aim at 4K, try these in-game Optimized Settings:
  
  DLSS Render Scale: 50% (which will be = DLSS Performance preset)
  Frame Generation: On
  View Distance Quality: High
  Anti-Aliasing Quality: High
  Post-Effects Quality: Very High
  Shadow Quality: High
  Texture Quality: Cinematic
  Visual Effect Quality: High
  Hair Quality: High
  Vegetation Quality: High
  Global Illumination Quality: High
  Reflection Quality: Very High
  Motion Blur: Strong
  Full Ray Tracing: Very High (this will be the most impactful setting both for visuals AND performance, so if even with all the other settings above you are not getting acceptable framerate and input lag, lower it to Medium or as last resort turn it Off)

Enjoy :)

-P