DF Weekly: a snippet of Black Myth: Wukong PS5 footage arrives – so what do we make of it?
This week’s DF Direct ‘drops’ a little early owing to a somewhat busy and congested week for us, and our usual two-hour-long chat show begins with a look at the Black Myth: Wukong benchmarking tool – and the fact that (when we filmed, at least), the developer had not shown any video footage of the PlayStation 5 version in action. Reviewers were told not to expect PS5 code pre-launch. However, yesterday, a short snippet of gameplay captured from the console did appear online, so we scrambled to take a look at it and append some thoughts about it to our show.
Let’s talk about the footage itself, hailing from PlayStation China (though we picked it up from the developer’s feed, which linked to IGN China instead). First of all, there are clear issues with the quality of the footage. The appearance of developer IP addresses in the top-right may suggest that the PS5’s system level video recording system was used, which was then re-processed by YouTube’s systems, creating a very muddy picture, heavy on compression artefacts. Even so, we can see that the game is targeting 60fps, albeit with some heavy hits to frame-rate when screen-filling effects present on-screen. Black Myth: Wukong as presented here doesn’t have any screen-tearing.
Beyond that, it is difficult to tell you much more about the game when we have no context on how the clip was captured and what settings (assuming the console version settings) it was using. To be honest, the murkiness of the footage has left me with more questions than answers – especially after carrying out performance analysis on the clip. It’s not easy to gauge frame-rate from lossy video, but we’ve done it in the past with streaming services and the technique is pretty straightforward and boils down to manually scrolling through the clip frame by frame and marking up duplicates. In the process, we got to see how the game looks from one frame to the next and there’s some evidence here to suggest that AMD FSR 3 frame generation is being used in this footage.
0:00:00 Introduction0:01:48 News 01: Black Myth: Wukong benchmark drops0:22:35 News 02: Zen 5 launch unravels0:44:24 News 03: Switch 2 possibly “delayed” further into 20250:54:49 News 04: Unannounced game Deadlock hits 18,000 concurrent players1:06:33 News 05: FF7 Remake trilogy third title to switch to UE5?1:12:32 News 06: Man connects 444 consoles to one TV1:20:39 News 07: Tango Gameworks acquired by Krafton1:24:26 News 08: Forza Horizon 5 potentially headed to PS51:34:40 News 09: Valve plans to offer SteamOS to other handhelds1:44:58 Supporter Q1: As Microsoft increasingly goes multiplatform, what’s the point of Xbox?1:49:45 Supporter Q2: Should Microsoft be putting older exclusives on Switch?1:52:10 Supporter Q3: What does the DF audience have to look forward to in 2025?1:56:12 Supporter Q4: Which graphically intense ports should come to Switch 2?2:00:10 Supporter Q5: What are some technical annoyances you have with modern gaming?2:04:34 Supporter Q6: What is the best way to achieve good frame-rates for PS3 titles?
Despite the low quality, a kind of concertina strobing effect is seen when scrolling through the footage, particularly visible with post-process effects dominating the screen. Fast whip-pans on the camera show edge artefacts that present as ‘borders’ of a sort on the sides of the footage, but perhaps the strongest indicator that frame generation is being used comes down to the way particles animate. They are fully formed on one frame, then ghost into two separate images before resolving into one particle again on the following frame. A further piece of evidence is that the UI appears to noticeably animate at half-rate during the footage.
