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New Intelligence Report

Editor: Editorial Department

【New Wisdom Introduction】After four years of waiting, Black Myth: Wukong is finally online. With excited hearts and shaking hands, players from all over the world gathered in front of their computer screens to witness this milestone in the history of Chinese games. After breaking many records, will the Chinese gaming landscape be shaken by it?

Just now, as soon as "Black Myth: Wukong" was launched, it created a miracle in the history of Chinese games!

After four years, the players who have been eagerly waiting for this moment are excited.

"Black Myth: Wukong" will be the first domestically produced stand-alone game to reach world-class level, and is destined to be a milestone in the history of Chinese games.

The game has already broken many records before it was launched.

According to the 2024 China Game Sales Half-Year Chart, the game's sales reached 390 million yuan after one month of pre-sale, with sales of 1.2 million copies, significantly breaking the previous pre-sale record of domestic games (100,000 copies). Today, its sales have exceeded 400 million yuan.

According to data from Steam, "Black Myth: Wukong" not only swept Chinese players, but also continued to dominate the list of global best-selling products!

And, it also set a new record for Steam download bandwidth.

After the pre-load was enabled, the bandwidth used for Steam downloads skyrocketed, reaching a peak of 70Tbps.

The editor spent 328 yuan and started playing it as soon as possible.

Since the laptop is connected to RTX 4090D, there will be significant performance loss.

However, after maxing out the image quality as recommended, the performance test was able to reach 85 frames per second, which is still relatively smooth.

The Chinese mythological super IP "Journey to the West", coupled with excellent game production and a variety of elements, gave birth to this super hit.

Previously, most of the exquisite 3A masterpieces were overseas games, so this time players could hardly suppress their excitement.

Game producer Feng Ji previously revealed that the hourly game development cost of Black Myth: Wukong exceeds 20 million yuan. The team estimates that the overall game duration will be more than 20 hours, and the development cost will be at least 300 million to 400 million yuan.

IGN China praised the game: This game embodies "proud quality" and is "the throbbing in the blood of Chinese players."

Everyone is looking forward to it: the success or failure of "Black Myth: Wukong" will affect the enthusiasm of domestic manufacturers to invest in domestic independent games. From then on, the Chinese game industry may be changed forever.

Once it goes online, it's all hot searches

After it was officially launched at 10 o'clock, the entire Internet was almost flooded with topics about Black Wukong.

Netizens joked that the first difficulty of the 81 difficulties is to "decompress". Some people were stuck in the decompression process, while others had already started to fight monsters.

The second difficulty is getting stuck on the shading compiler.

After overcoming the two dilemmas, the plot sets Sun Wukong, who went to the West to obtain Buddhist scriptures and became a Buddha, fighting against Erlang Shen.

In addition, there are various related topics that dominate the hot list.

Four years, like a dream

It is worth mentioning that on the Steam platform alone, the number of online users has exceeded one million, which is truly a phenomenon!

In the comment section, someone lamented, "Looking back on this day four years ago, it was like a dream. Everyone can be Monkey King. The combination of blood, history, culture, and childhood memories is something we couldn't imagine in the past years."

Some people even started writing poetry.

Shocking news, face destiny!

Foreigners also argued fiercely about whether Sun Wukong was the strongest fighter in the world.

Changing fate against all odds, the aesthetic effect is amazing

As soon as he appeared, Sun Wukong, wearing golden armor, stood up, holding the golden cudgel in his hand, and said, "I have saved the people. I have obtained the scriptures."

What he wanted was not fame, but to return to the Flower-Fruit Mountain to die and live a carefree life. However, the Heavenly Court still wanted him to be a deity again.

In order to resist fate, he decided to fight alone.

He was seen rushing into the air, the majestic Four Heavenly Kings stood in the sky, and the Heavenly Dog suddenly swooped down and roared at Sun Wukong.

Then, Erlang Shen appeared, and when kind words of persuasion failed, the two began to fight.

The image of Sun Wukong when the camera zooms in is even more fascinating.

In the initial plot setting, Sun Wukong’s battle against Erlang Shen was just to advance the plot and give the editor some practice.

From underground to the sky, the editor used all his strength to engage in a fierce battle.

Unexpectedly, the golden hoop was suddenly tightened, restricting Sun Wukong's fighting ability.

In the end, Erlang Shen immediately counterattacked, and Sun Wukong turned into his "stone" prototype again.

Although the story of the Monkey King has ended, the story of us little monkeys has just begun.

The two little demons picked up the peaches on the ground, and they turned out to be the editor himself. In the first round of fighting, the editor, who was unfamiliar with the skills, was defeated and turned into Monkey Hair.

The visual effect of Sun Wukong offering incense to the God of Land is also amazing. The details are even more amazing, and the archival action of lighting incense in Chinese culture is truly reproduced - the shaking hand action to shake off the fire.

In general, whether it is the early decompression, shader compilation, or the entire game process, the editor's experience is very smooth.

Although the experience is short, the aesthetic effects of the game are amazing.

And behind this is a technology that we are all very familiar with.

NVIDIA AI support

The reason why the graphics of "Black Myth: Wukong" are so beautiful and shocking is largely due to the NVIDIA AI technology behind it.

With the support of panoramic ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS 3, the game's graphics effects and technical improvements are very obvious.

Realistic panoramic ray tracing makes the lighting, special effects and immersion of the game screen breathtaking.

The AI-driven DLSS 3 uses super performance to restore the extraordinary details in the game one by one. The immersive visual effects are maximized and players can enjoy extremely high frame rates.

DLSS 3

Five years ago, Nvidia came up with DLSS, which improved performance through AI neural rendering thanks to the Tensor Cores inside every GeForce RTX GPU.

Moreover, DLSS is constantly getting better and is updated regularly to ensure that super-resolution and frame-breaking features always maintain the best experience.

DLSS frame rate enhancement is an AI-powered graphics technology that can greatly improve performance while maintaining good image quality and responsiveness.

Providing support behind the scenes is NVIDIA's new 4th-generation Tensor Core and optical flow accelerator based on the Ada Lovelace architecture.

In addition, this technology also integrates NVIDIA's Reflex low-latency technology for optimal responsiveness.

Among them, the convolutional autoencoder generated by DLSS frames has four input sources - the current and previous game frames, the optical flow field generated by the optical flow accelerator under the Ada Lovelace architecture, and game engine data such as motion vectors and depth.

During this process, Ada Lovelace's optical flow accelerator analyzes two consecutive in-game frames and calculates the optical flow field.

The optical flow field captures the direction and speed at which pixels move from frame 1 to frame 2, while the optical flow accelerator is able to capture pixel-level information such as particles, reflections, shadows, and lighting.

All of the above are not included in the game engine motion vector calculation.

When used with DLSS Super Resolution and NVIDIA Reflex, all of the RTX technologies combine to deliver incredible performance gains and outstanding image quality.

Moreover, excellent results can be achieved regardless of whether the local performance is limited by the CPU or GPU.

Panoramic ray tracing

Full-view ray tracing accurately simulates light throughout a scene.

However, panoramic ray tracing for real-time video games requires extremely high GPU performance.

It wasn’t until the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores, and DLSS 3’s AI-powered rendering acceleration, that this became truly possible.

Now, players can experience panoramic ray tracing at a speed of up to 60+ FPS!

Full resolution multi-bounce ray-traced indirect lighting

Many players have found that the lighting in Black Myth: Wukong is very delicate and natural, and the scenes are lifelike.

This is because the game's naturally colored light is able to bounce twice throughout the world, creating more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion effects.

The hero behind this is multi-bounce ray tracing indirect lighting.

This technology replaces rendering techniques such as screen space reflections, screen space ambient occlusion, and existing global illumination solutions with a single unified algorithm.

This makes the lighting of scenes and objects more accurate, and the immersiveness of each scene is maximized.

Full-resolution ray-traced reflections

When the puddle scene appeared in the game screen, the editors couldn't help but exclaimed:

The puddle shows a mirror-like surrounding area, the details are so fine and realistic!

After consulting our friends at NVIDIA, we learned that such realistic immersion is due to full-resolution ray tracing reflections.

With this technology, reflections contain details of where light bounces and are presented at full resolution, making the game world significantly more vivid and further increasing the sense of immersion.

Ray Tracing Particles in Reflections

As we all know, using ray tracing to render particle systems is extremely challenging.

This is because most particles are translucent, which is likely to cause drawing order problems.

Moreover, particles have unique properties. For example, some particles are very small and difficult to capture, some need to automatically adjust their direction, and some have special shapes, such as particles that simulate light beams.

To make matters worse, particle systems usually contain a large number of particles, which puts a huge strain on performance when using traditional ray tracing methods.

However, "Black Myth: Wukong" solves this problem!

Through a completely new technique, it uses two-level ray tracing to perform draw-order-independent transparent rendering for large numbers of patch systems.

This allows the game's particle system to be rendered efficiently with real-time reflections.

I believe players have all felt that during the battle, the reflection of particles is particularly vivid and realistic, allowing players to enjoy an unprecedented visual experience.

Ray Traced Caustics

Careful players will find that another reason for the game's immersive feel is the distorted projection of light bouncing off the water surface onto other surfaces.

This effect relies on a technology called "ray tracing caustics".

When this technique is enabled, light in the scene refracts with very realistic results.

Look closely at the picture below, the ripples on the water surface are shown on the surface of nearby objects underwater.

Remember that when enough light bounces off a particular surface, it can illuminate some areas of the surface of that object, making them brighter than the average for the scene.

The ray tracing caustics technology perfectly reproduces this phenomenon.

Ray Traced Shadows

Players who pay attention to the details of the picture will pay attention to the game's performance of shadows.

This is because shadows are a key visual cue.

"Black Myth: Wukong" also performs extremely well in this regard.

As you can see from the picture below, the shadows cast by distant high-altitude objects have become softer and more realistic.

This is because, with ray tracing enabled, the environment has high-resolution details with continuous outlines, contact hard shadows, no aliasing, and self-shadowing, making the entire environment richer.

Nearby objects will cast complete and accurate shadows.

Even distant landscapes and minute details of nested structures can be depicted, making the image quality more satisfying.

Some people say that "Black Myth: Wukong" is an industrial miracle of Chinese games.

What kind of storm will this first Chinese 3A game, produced from scratch, stir up among players around the world?

Let's wait and see.

References:

https://www.nvidia.cn/geforce/news/black-myth-wukong-full-ray-tracing-dlss-3/

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/black-myth-wukong-geforce-rtx-40-series-bundle/