Source: Quantum bit.

Global players fight in "Black Myth: Wukong", with a peak of 2.223 million people online at the same time, witnessing the miracle!

Ranked second in the overall Steam platform, and first in the history of single-player games. As a pure single-player game, it is only second to the online game 'PUBG' that upgraded the configurations of Internet cafes nationwide.

With 0.1 million soldiers, each person is responsible for defeating 22 monkeys.

In the first 24 hours after the launch of 'Black Myth', how many records were broken and how much history was created?

One month before the release, the pre-sale volume has exceeded 1.2 million copies, breaking the record for pre-sale of domestic games (the original record was at the level of 0.1 million).

On the first day of release, the total sales volume has exceeded 4.5 million copies on all platforms, and the sales are expected to exceed 1.5 billion yuan. The sales chart on the Steam platform has been ranked first for three consecutive weeks (excluding free games).

Steam's peak pre-download bandwidth reached 70Tbps, which has become a spectacle. It is even suspected that someone is downloading games even in Antarctica.

In terms of game reputation, Steam platform quickly achieved a 96% positive rating, with a 'flood of praise', MetaCritics platform user score also reached a high score of 8.7.

Myth of Empires is a great success, the happiest besides game enthusiasts and players are...

That would be nvidia.

On the second day of the game release, nvidia participated in the world's largest game exhibition, the Cologne Game Show, showcasing the game's performance in the highest quality.

Nvidia emphasizes that to achieve the ultimate gaming experience, you need to support RTX 40 series graphics cards with full ray tracing and DLSS 3 technology.

Following the trend, it was announced that there will be 20 more games supporting the same visual technology!

Meanwhile, nvidia also released the tailor-made exclusive driver version 560.94 for Myth of Empires overnight.

According to player feedback from testing, the frame rates of 40 series cards have seen significant improvements, with an average increase of 1-2 frames for the 2080 Quantum Bit.

Not only that, but when 'Black Myth' was about to be released, Nvidia started helping with publicity in the global market, contributing more than the game developers themselves.

They even organized events to introduce the background story of 'Journey to the West' to foreign players.

In fact, Nvidia not only played a major role in promoting 'Black Myth', but also collaborated closely with the game developers during the development stage.

The stunning game graphics we see today are not only due to the game developers' strong artistic skills, but also thanks to Nvidia's technology.

What Nvidia technologies are used in 'Black Myth'?

In order to create a more immersive gaming environment, ray tracing can be considered an essential technology.

Moreover, 'Black Myth' uses not just ordinary ray tracing, but a more complex global illumination ray tracing.

Global illumination ray tracing not only needs to render a viewpoint, but also handle omnidirectional lighting, including optical phenomena such as refraction and reflection for each ray, to ensure consistent image quality in all directions. As a result, the computational workload can be overwhelming.

So, what are the highlights of NVIDIA's exclusive panoramic ray tracing technology?

First, let's take a look at a basic phenomenon in optics - reflection.

With NVIDIA's panoramic ray tracing technology, the reflected light in "Black Myth" can seamlessly blend into the surrounding environment and be rendered at full resolution.

In games, one of the most noticeable scenes that showcases reflection is the water surface.

The following image shows the water surface effect without panoramic ray tracing, which still looks decent.

But if we simply compare it with the image after enabling panoramic ray tracing, the difference is clear.

With ray-traced reflections, the water in the picture becomes more clear, and the reflection of stones by the water's edge becomes sharper.

Furthermore, NVIDIA graphics cards also support multi-ray traced reflections in "Black Myth".

In reality, it is quite common for a ray of light to interact with different interfaces of media and undergo multiple reflections.

However, replicating such a phenomenon in a game is a very complex task.

In "Black Myth: Wukong", with the help of Nvidia's multi-bounce ray tracing indirect lighting technology, the rays of light in the game can be reflected twice, achieving a more realistic indirect lighting effect.

At the same time, Nvidia has unified a series of rendering algorithms, combining screen space reflections, screen space ambient occlusion, and other rendering techniques with existing global illumination solutions, thus accurately depicting scene and object lighting.

In ray tracing games, the reflection of attacks, explosions, and flame particle effects is also a major challenge.

Even if we leave out the complex nature of particles, the attribute of translucency alone can easily cause issues with rendering order.

But for visual effects, game effects often involve a large number of individual particles. If traditional ray tracing algorithms are used, it will bring tremendous performance pressure.

To solve this problem, Nvidia uses a two-level ray tracing approach in "Black Myth: Wukong" to render the transparency of a large number of particles independent of the rendering order, thereby solving this problem.

For example, in this scenario, the effects of flame before and after turning on ray tracing are significantly different, and the reflections that were not present underwater before turning on are also completed.

In addition to these reflection-related images, the panoramic ray tracing technology used in "Black Myth: Wukong" also supports rendering optical properties such as dispersion and shadows.

We know that when light reaches the interface between different media, not only reflections occur, but also optical phenomena such as refraction, especially if the interface is a curved surface, it becomes even more complex.

The dispersion simulation in "Black Myth: Wukong" simulates a series of effects that occur when light encounters water, curved surfaces, and objects in real life, creating unique light patterns on surfaces such as riverbeds.

As for shadows, they are clearly an important visual element. Ray tracing portrays more delicate, anti-aliased details through continuous contours, contact hardening and softening, self-shadowing, and other methods.

With the support of DLSS 3.5 ray tracing, the texture of the graphics is guaranteed, but the game's performance is also another important factor affecting players' experience.

One of the most intuitive indicators that can reflect performance is the frame rate.

Therefore, NVIDIA RTX 40 series graphics cards are equipped with dedicated Tensor Cores, allowing DLSS 3 to leverage AI technology to enhance GPU performance.

Specifically, this technology is DLSS Super Resolution, which can use deep learning neural networks to take low-resolution content as input and output high-resolution frames.

In addition, DLSS 3 also applies frame generation technology, which utilizes the optical flow accelerator in the 40 series graphics cards to analyze consecutive frames and motion data, and generate more high-quality frames without compromising image quality and response speed.

At 4K (3840x2160) resolution, running "Black Myth" on the 4090 graphics card with super resolution (performance priority) and frame generation enabled, as well as ray tracing enabled, and all effects maxed out, can achieve a frame rate close to 100 frames per second.

If it is 2K (2560x1440), changing the super resolution mode to quality priority, the frame rate on the 4090 can be increased to 123.3 frames, and the 4070 can also achieve a frame rate of over 60 frames per second.

If further reduced to 1080P (1920x1080), models above the 4070 can achieve a frame rate of over 90 frames per second, with the highest 4090 even reaching 153.4, and the 4060 having over 50 frames.

This series of technologies, along with "Black Myth", were brought to the largest game exhibition in the world, Gamescom, by NVIDIA.

During the exhibition, NVIDIA revealed that, in addition to "Black Myth", over 600 games and applications have already supported DLSS and RTX technologies, and announced that 20 new games have joined the lineup.

This includes highly anticipated new titles such as "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle", "Dune: Awakening", and "FINAL FANTASY XVI".

At the same time, the first game supporting AI NPC made using Nvidia technology also appeared at the Cologne Game Show.

Nvidia's AI NPC technology was first introduced to the audience at this year's CES, where visitors could experience free conversations with NPCs in a ramen shop, attracting a lot of attention.

After half a year, this technology finally has its first official product - the mech fighting game "Mecha Break" developed by Xishanju Games, a subsidiary of Kingsoft Corporation.

Unlike previous AI NPC demos, "Mecha Break" uses the NVIDIA Nemotron-4 4B Instruct mini model for on-device processing, which Nvidia specifically designed for role-playing games.

The facial expressions of the characters are processed by the Nvidia Audio2Face-3D microservice, while user speech recognition is handled by the Whisper model. Both of these services can run on-device.

Providing voice support for game characters is ElevenLabs, a well-known AI voice synthesis service provider. Currently, it has not been integrated on-device and needs to be implemented in the cloud.

After seeing this series of new technologies demonstrated by Nvidia, let's turn our attention back to "Black Myth".

"Black Myth" has become a phenomenon.

"Black Myth: Wu Kong" is no longer just a game, it is a phenomenon in the entire business and technology industry.

The official final trailer has reached 17 million views on Bilibili and over 1.3 million views on YouTube.

Partners big and small are able to enjoy huge traffic just by being associated with it.

Before the game was released, the collaboration with Luckin Coffee for a co-branded drink sold out within seconds.

When it comes to playing games, the most essential component is the graphics card. According to Tom's Hardware statistics, there have been at least eight custom graphics cards with a "Black Myth: Wu Kong" theme, focusing on high-end models such as 4070S, 4070Ti, and 4080s.

Well-known graphics card manufacturers like Colorful, MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, Inno3D, Palit, Gainward, and Galax don't want to miss this opportunity.

Even NVIDIA has released a custom version of the 4080S as a special edition, and they are currently running a lottery where lucky winners can leave a message to try their luck.

As for AIGC, they are also eager to catch up with this trend.

AI video production company Viva used AI to transform the trailer for 'Black Myth'.

Kimi, Byte Bean, Tencent Yuanbao... large-scale AI assistant apps are starting from the recommendation issue.

As an investor in game science, Tencent also publicized the development tools used by 'Black Myth' and Tencent's self-developed TAPD agile R&D collaboration platform.

Do you think the online player count for 'Black Myth' can reach a new high this weekend?

Editor/Lambor