I was so relieved that Black Myth: Wukong, the first AAA game by a Chinese studio, didn’t flop on release. Instead, it garnered 2.2 million concurrent users on the Steam PC gaming platform – the second highest number ever.
The Tencent-backed studio, Game Science, had teased gamers for several years with incredible-looking trailers and the game seemed too good to be true. I played Wukong last night and wow! It has luscious visuals drawn from Chinese martial arts movies, thanks to the Unreal Engine 5. The gameplay is pretty good – you prance around monsters and bludgeon them with your magic staff in the style of frenetic Japanese action games like Nioh.
Guess what? The game also runs best on AI power.
- The game is available for the PC and Sony PS5. The best visuals are experienced on the PC, but you need a strong graphics processor (GPU) like an Nvidia RTX 4070. Don’t bother playing Wukong on your office laptop.
- The GPU generates all the 3D visuals in the game, and these days, Nvidia GPUs use AI technology to boost frame rates for smoother gameplay, and provide realistic lighting effects through raytracing.
- And if you didn’t know, Nvidia GPUs are the hardware powering all major Generative AI apps like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
- The Sony PS5 runs on an AMD GPU. In the PC world, AMD’s share of the consumer GPU market is small as Nvidia GPUs are superior at AI-processing for games and Gen AI.
Hardcore gamers have known the power of GPUs for several decades now, and it is only now that everyone else is slowly finding out what a GPU is, or who Nvidia is (it’s one of most valuable companies in the world, folks!).
Mid-range GPUs for desktop PCs cost about $1,000 SGD, and the most powerful RTX 4090 is often priced above $2,500. You can also buy gaming laptops with GPUs but they tend to cost above $2,000, are heavy, and need to be plugged into the power socket all the time.
Gaming PCs are the real “AI PCs”, as they will also run AI apps like Flux, Whisper and RTX Chat very well. You don’t need really need one to use ChatGPT or other Gen AI apps in the cloud, but once you get one and start playing today’s AAA games, you’ll wonder why you didn’t do so earlier.
