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Monkey Magic Update
Game science exploded into the gaming sphere from Nowhere with 2024’s smash hit Black Myth Wukong, or Monkey Magic or Journey to the West for us older peeps. But, as I covered in my pre-launch review over on IGN. It took some choices on PS5 and PC that reflected a few more months in the bakery would not have gone amiss. Now, a few months after the Xbox release and over a year since 1st launch, the Chinese studio have released their biggest patch yet, adding a brand-new performance mode on PS5 and Pro, removing FSR3 Frame Gen and a little more whilst increasing IQ. But the PRO was apparently patched much earlier as I discovered during this review. I had the PS5 Pro patched to the v1.013 that dropped in December last year, and this added PSSR to both Quality and Balanced from a 2304x1296P approximate base. The result is a slightly softer but more detailed image that is less impacting by the break-up and ghosting of the PS5 FSR2 Quality mode which operates at an approx. 1440p base resolution reconstructed back to 4K also.
So, patching them both to version 1.020 that dropped this week, we see a slew of changes once again over both these modes. The biggest in the new performance mode which disables all Lumen GI and predominantly AO causing internal, none sun shadow Occlusion sections to look terrible. Very flat with no shadows, AO and no diffuse lighting across the normal and surface details also lowers the quality of objects and textures. Outside in the direct sun though, which is where you spend most of your time, the impact is much smaller and in places better. For example, the lanterns here now cast light onto the Pagoda entrances from a much further distance due to the lack of GI bounce diffusing it out, but also sun shadows are much darker, higher resolution and better filtered than the prior performance and even balanced mode now which can look better at times, and at worse only slightly worse of different. Grass and AO has also been tweaked with a better blend, again outdoors, in mirroring the previous Lumen GI look far cheaper. Then tone mapping has also changed and some other colour tweaks, such as the Wolf here with the previous White fur now being a light blue hue (maybe from the moonlight) which along with the improved self-shadow quality increasing AO on enemies and Monkey himself. All this does offer another benefit though, 2 big ones. Now FSR2 Frame gen is disabled with a straight, native 60fps target on both PS5 and Professional players but also resolutions have changed. With base PS5 in this mode now targeting a flat 2560×1440 vis FSR2 with DRS, but the PS5Pro targets approx 36% higher than that, at 3200×1800 but retains PSSR from an approx. 2560×1440 base resolution, which is significantly better than FSR2 with it retaining more detail, high frequency textures with hardly any ghosting, less dither and visual artefacts over FSR2, increasing the visual clarity and details. And the Grass and Level of Detail has also been slightly reduced on PS5 now being below the Pro and all other modes on PS5, including the old Performance mode with framegen which remains but is now called Legacy. Comparing this to the older performance mode though the other changes have also been carried out here with reduced shadow filtering, AO and GI changes to Lumen which carry over to both consoles in the 3 other modes which are Quality, Balanced and Performance Legacy. See here with the changes to shadow cascades causing the old light seep now gone on all new modes, and the flickering shadow maps in the background being more stable now in the new mode, shadows are thicker, more stable and darker. With a Penumbra effect also in place with the new Performance mode solving the Peter Panning on Monkey here which is still present in Balanced and the old Legacy mode on Pro and PS5 due to the resolution and filtering cuts not being balanced against the loss of precision, but in Quality and the new Performance mode they are correct and look better than these old modes. So, it is a mixed level of tweaks and changes but the new Performance mode is better or worse depending on where you are but how about performance then, well lets close out Quality and balanced first.
These modes are mostly reflective of the visual tweaks to Lumen, shadows and LoD and mentioned but resolutions have changed on some again, but the Pro does offer slightly better Shadow and Lument quality in all modes over the base PS5, see here on the Wolf’s fur but also the ground tessellation and the GI bounce on the temple roof edge. Some of this may be resolution related as Pro is also always higher with PSSR seemingly gone in all modes. Instead Quality is returned back on PS5 now to approx. 1440P reconstructed back to 4K, with Pro going slightly higher at a 1620P back to 4K, an approximate 27% resolution increase along with a bump in visual settings.
Balanced is next, Pro takes a minor haircut to 1512P now, but still reconstructs back to 4K for the 25ms target at 120Hz. Base players now target 2880×1620 with no reconstruction, again in side by sides you can see a small increase in clarity on the Pro and detail with small improvements on visuals but this is closest mode between them now, Finally Legacy mode stays as was, so flat 1080p on PS5 and flat 1296P on Pro which both look very soft and noisier than all other modes, with the frame gen causing some horrendous breakup in action and flicker judder along with lower input latency caused by the delayed frame for the interpolation. See here as the generated frame just causing a mess of pixels which flicks on and off as you play, or the flicker on the glow around Monkey’s staff or on Monkey as he moves up the stairs in these side by sides. The Pro is even better in its new performance mode due to the higher visual settings and resolution which means this mode, although it has its own issues just covered, is on aggregate, much, much better than the legacy mode.
So, I have detailed the good and bad visual and technical changes made for this new patch across all modes, but most specifically the new, true performance mode. As the launch version was, as I said then, just the balanced mode with FSR2 Frame Gen enabled. Here though, we get a tailored version that cuts back hair, Fur quality, geometry, LoD, lighting, shadows and lumen completely but also makes changes to compensate with clear areas to improve on. But performance and input latency has improved, on all modes but mostly in Performance.
Input times
The prior Frame Gen performance mode had a cost which meant the median input latency to screen was 152.5ms using version 1.009 on the base PS5. This was improved in the 1.013 patch but the current legacy mode reflects this in 1.020 with a small 4.6ms decrease to 148ms, again using Frame gen to interpolate dropped frames from the circa 42fps average. The new performance mode without framegen is 44ms faster now, some 29% improvement hitting a new median of 108.5ms, which is not lighting fast for 60fps but much better than the old mode. Balanced and Quality get steadily worse as you would expect reflecting the cost of UE5, Lumen and other aspects within the engine and game render. Balanced is best at 127ms and quality the slowest at 171ms which is why it can feel more sluggish playing such a time centric title, and all helps to push more players to the performance or balanced modes.
How does it all run the, well quality is capped to 30 now on both so expect that to be locked now bar the traversal, sector stutter which still occurs on occasion.
Base PS5 first, using 120hz output with VRR (which you do not need but I wanted to ensure highest Perf). Pitting balanced next to New Perf mode in the wolf fight which was a stress test, we see almost locked 60 and a decent 40fps readout for Perf and balanced respectively. It can be fillrate and bandwidth bound here with the significant but clever reduction on Fur to more hair cards and less splines than balanced or quality helps. But when filling the screen, light, alpha and such we can drop a couple of frames, It performs similar to the old legacy mode, Helped by the DRS in this mode allowing it to render above and below the old level with a superior IQ and better performance, true of balanced also which appears fixed res and the bigger drops suggest that, falling slightly worse than before but still close enough to maintain a high 39.8 FPS average with a few mid 30s cropping up. You can still run at 60hz and target the intermediate 45 middle ground as before, but expect this to be closer to 40 now than 45 as we see with the Pro.
PS5 Pro does push higher resolutions, superior image quality and effects and as I have covered in previous videos, this means it can run close or slightly worse than base consoles in the higher modes. This is true of performance with it being marginally lower than the base machine, with slightly more dropped frames but in reality, it is a wash between then and more a academic note here that the DRS range used in the performance mode also, at least it appears dynamic, offers sufficient headroom to keep within 98% of the required 16ms. With Balanced we see a similar average with dips into the mid-30s also on occasion, offering slightly better averages as this 60hz mode can offer slightly better frame times on a per frame basis, but if you have the choice play at 120hz output as the 25ms 40fps mode feels more consistent and therefore better to play and should have been how the mode launched with back in 2024, but still welcome after so many moons.
Summary
It may have took a year, but this update is a good one. The PSSR modes are excellent now, potentially a first glimpse of a new PSSR mode with the resolution increase from v1.013 being around 28% more which means they found that with work and improvements in the engine code, or Sony got .5ms back in the ML LLM it uses, or DRS is running on all versions, and they had more headroom. Either or, the results speak for themselves here, IQ is superior, effects better(mostly) and performance and latency is with a new, true performance mode being a mixed visual bag but still a net win. Image issues, ghosting, noise and such an still remain on all modes and formats, base PS5 with FSR2 suffers the most. But the team have not left it alone and with a final push to add interior GI and AO I think it could be even more monkey magic at play.