We’re currently working on a review of MSI’s RTX 5070 Ti VENTUS PZ GPU and Rick put us on notice that the NVIDIA 591.44 driver kicked in some serious VTEC, yo, on Black Myth: Wukong. It seems possible that NVIDIA is correcting for a Windows 11 update that dropped last month where users were up in arms about significant performance drops across multiple games.
Of course, the Vole did not acknowledge such performance drops, but looking at NVIDIA’s release notes for 591.44, they make a general statement about a bug fixed on the topic of “Users running R580 branch drivers (58x.xx) or newer may observe lower performance in some games after updating to Windows 11 October 2025 KB5066835”.
MSI Ventus GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Graphics Card RTX 5070 Ti 16G VENTUS 3X PZ OC
Let’s take a look-see at the differences we observed between 581.80 and 591.44 for Black Myth: Wukong:
At 1440p with the Very High Preset and Upscaling set to Quality, we found the 581.80 driver to provide 57 FPS, upscaled to 86 FPS. After the driver upgrade, we saw 87 FPS (an improvement of 52.6%) and an upscaling improvement of 30.2%.
Kicking on Ray Tracing to Very High gave us an even larger boost – 591.44 increased performance by 88% over 581.80, and adding Ray Tracing to the mix, we saw a 58% boost.
These are quite significant gains – of course, we don’t have data for this card going back in time, but we do have others, such as the ASUS Prime GeForce 5070 Ti that we reviewed back in February. This was with driver version 572.43, but we saw performance closer to the 581.80 doldrums than what we’re currently seeing with today’s 591.44.
Bottom line here – if you’re playing Black Myth: Wukong on an NVIDIA card, run, don’t walk, to update your drivers and carry on.