Earlier this week, we reported on the PS5 version of Black Myth: Wukong, and how it seems to hold up from a technical perspective. Our impressions were based on roughly six hours of playtime, and our main takeaway was that while none of the game's three graphical modes are perfect, the performance mode in particular seemed fairly solid, offering gameplay at 60 frames per second — or near enough — in exchange for a lower resolution.
As it turns out, though, Digital Foundry has identified an additional performance mode problem that we never quite picked up on. According to their analysis, Wukong actually makes use of frame generation tech in order to close in on its 60fps target. Basically, frame generation does exactly what its name suggests — it artificially provides more frames per second to give the impression of a smoother visual experience.
However, in Wukong's case, the frame generation results in increased input lag. Essentially, you're playing the game at around 30fps — it's just that the frame generation makes it look like you're sitting pretty at 60. Inevitably, this means that you'll run into moments where you'll swear that you pressed the dodge button, or hit L1 to take a sip of your health-restoring drink — but the input simply doesn't register.
Needless to say, this is far from ideal for a title that's so heavily focused on action combat. For the record, we had started to notice some kind of input lag while venturing further into the game for review purposes — but we were putting it down to the protagonist's long attack and recovery animations. Digital Foundry's findings make much more sense of the situation.
Fortunately, Digital Foundry believes that Wukong's PS5 performance can be improved — so developer Game Science will hopefully grace us with a patch or two in the near future.