Black Myth Wukong has launched to critical acclaim on PC and consoles, becoming the second-most played game (of all time) on Steam with over 2 million concurrent players. Our optimization guide highlighting the performance impact of various graphics settings, including ray-tracing is already up. In this piece, we analyze the game’s performance on the Steam Deck, detailing the optimal settings for playing Black Myth on the handheld.
Performance and FPS
FSR/XeSS-based frame generation means you have two performance options: ~50 FPS with a bit of frametime variance or ~30-40 FPS+ with more stable frame pacing. We tested the game using FSR 90, TSR 90, and XeSS 90 with frame generation enabled for the first two in separate runs.
Black Myth: Wukong averages an impressive 50 FPS on the Steam Deck with frame generation. The frametimes are a little messy but I’d call it playable (will vary from user to user). If you prefer smoother gameplay at slightly reduced quality, you can reduce the “Super Resolution” slider to 75 (or even 60) and disable frame generation.
These pertain to the “Quality” and “Balanced” upscaling presets and should get you 40-45 FPS, roughly half of the Deck’s native refresh rate. If you’re on the other side of the spectrum, you can enable frame generation and reduce the slider to 75, placing you at an average of nearly 60 FPS.
Graphics Settings
We ran Black Myth: Wukong at the Steam Deck’s native resolution of 800p (1280×800), in borderless mode, with V-Sync/framerate cap disabled. The aspect ratio was set to “Automatic” and the motion blur was switched off.
In the “Super Resolution” section, you can choose from FSR, TSR, and XeSS. The first two support frame generation and are technically the same: temporal upscalers with no Tensor core component. XeSS uses mixed precision compute (DP4a) to deliver the same result as the XMX cores at a slightly increased overhead.
In the detailed graphics segment, we reduced all the settings to low, except texture quality which was set to “Medium.” Ray-tracing was disabled (goes without saying). The game throws a performance issue warning, but feel free to ignore that.
Visual Quality
If you want the best graphics quality, opt for “XeSS” supersampling. As noted in our optimization guide, it produces vastly superior image quality than FSR, even on AMD hardware at roughly similar framerates. We got an average of 31 FPS with the resolution slider at 90, but you can experiment with lower values. I’d advise staying above 50, with 75 being the sweet spot. Anything between these two should get you to 40-45 FPS average.
Black Myth Wukong: Best Steam Deck Graphics Settings
| Optimized Settings | Steam Deck OLED |
|---|---|
| Resolution | 800p (1280×800) |
| View Distance | Low |
| Anti-aliasing | Low |
| Post-processing | Low |
| Shadow Quality | Low |
| Texture Quality | Medium |
| Reflection Quality | Low |
| Reflected Shadows | Low |
| Global Illumination | Low |
| Visual Effects | Low |
| Vegetation Quality | Low |
| Full Ray Tracing | Off |
| Ray Tracing Level | Off |
| Super Resolution | 75-90 |
| Super Resolution Sampling | FSR/XeSS |
| Frame Generation | On for 50 FPS/Off for 30 FPS |
| V-Sync | Off |
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