Alan Wake 2 is stuffed with PC tech. It feels like one of the true next-gen games that we’ve seen on PC, short of remakes like Portal RTX and updates like Cyberpunk 2077.
Alan Wake 2 is stuffed with PC tech. It feels like one of the true next-gen games that we’ve seen on PC, short of remakes like Portal RTX and updates like Cyberpunk 2077. From path tracing to frame generation to AI-powered denoisers, Alan Wake 2 shows off what PC has to offer in 2023, even if that means leaving less powerful rigs behind in this dust.
Alan Wake 2 supports both DLSS 3.5 and FSR 2, and you’ll get a much more consistent experience turning one of the features on. It seems the system requirements are providing a worst-case scenario, though. With the RTX 2060 Super, for example, I only dipped down to 30 fps once at 1080p, while mainly hovering in the mid-40s. That was with the game set to its High preset without upscaling.
Still, Alan Wake 2 is very demanding. As for whether that hardware demand is worth the visual payoff, that’s up to you. It’s clear Remedy set out to create a very dense, realistic world with Alan Wake 2, even if the performance on lower-end hardware suffers as a result. It may seem small, but a good example of that is the leaf you can see below.
This bundle of features is only supported on RTX graphics cards, with Frame Generation being limited to RTX 40-series GPUs. Alan Wake 2 also supports FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 for non-RTX GPUs, and you’ll need to have either DLSS or FSR turned on. Alan Wake 2 handles this in a strange way, though. With FSR 2, you can still set the game to native resolution, and with DLSS, native resolution will instead use Nvidia’s Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing .
Thankfully, the game doesn’t look bad without ray tracing. In the night scene below, you can see how developer Remedy attempts to capture the same atmosphere without ray tracing, even if the ray-traced version looks better. Here, ray tracing helps carry the light through the street fog in a more realistic way, while Ray Reconstruction bolsters that with better handling of the fence details.
What about mesh shaders? There was an outcry shortly after Alan Wake 2‘s system requirements went live, which came down to the fact that you would need an Nvidia RTX 20-series or AMD RX 6000-series GPU, or newer, to run the game. In a now-deleted tweet, a developer from Remedy explained this was due to mesh shaders, locking out older GPUs from being officially supported.
The issues go far deeper, though. With a spinning hard drive, audio tracks will desync from each other. That means you’ll run into issues where dialogue from a cutscene carries over into gameplay, as well as facial animations not matching with the voiceovers. The biggest problem was audio stuttering, though.
I suspect this is related to the issue one of the DT editors experienced with a game-breaking bug, where assets wouldn’t load fully when transitioning, causing the game to break. As mentioned, I wasn’t able to recreate the problem, even with the RTX 2060 Super and a spinning hard drive, but it’s clear Alan Wake 2 has some bottlenecks when it comes to streaming in assets.
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