The developers of Black Myth: Wukong have warned Intel PC users that they may face error messages, instability, and crashes when trying to play their blockbusting new game. In a pinned topic on the Steam Community message boards, the humbly named 'Free Range Key Technique Master' highlights potential 'Out of video memory' issues that may affect users of systems packing Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen CPUs. The error message might be displayed, and the system crashes during the shader compilation process on such systems, indicating the post.
At this time, we can't conclude that the pinned community post was precipitated by many Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen CPU users complaining about this particular crashing issue. The dev post notes that "some players" have reported this issue without quantification. At Tom's Hardware towers, we haven't yet experienced the mentioned 'Out of video memory' issues in our testing.
If you face an unhappy situation where your shiny new Black Myth: Wukong game is crashing on your Raptor Lake or Raptor Lake Refresh PC, you can try a few things. There's no black magic here, though, as the first suggestion is to ensure you have the latest BIOS and drivers for your Intel motherboard. That's a good idea to avoid the elevated voltages that have been degrading and shortening the lifespan of affected chips for months.
If you don't have an appropriate BIOS update available for your system at this time, it is suggested you try to gain some stability by tinkering with tuning tools like Intel XTU to reduce voltages. However, the developers of Black Myth: Wukong say manual undervolting and underclocking may affect smooth game performance.
Another step that crash-prone Black Myth: Wukong gamers might want to take is choosing the option to skip shader compilation. This would sidestep this specific crash issue, but it is warned that stability could remain an issue in the game without an up-to-date 13th and 14th Gen instability BIOS fix.
Today is Black Myth: Wukong's global launch day on PC and PS5, and the title has already been breaking popularity records before its first weekend. The game has also spawned eight new custom-designed Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 Super GPUs.