General Gaming Alan Wake II (PS5/Xbox Series/EGS) - update: upcoming patch (03/06) drastically improves GTX 10-series performance

[Greatoneshere]

Despite being in the middle of Armored Core VI on PC I'll be hitting pause on that to play this asap or switching between the two.

[stepee]

I should finish Spidey this weekend so hopefully should get about 10 days to beat this still while polishing off Mario before I have to go on vacation.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

8 hours ago, Moa said:

RIP my GTX 1080 system.

 

As a fellow GTX 1080 owner, I can relate

[best3444]

I bought Spiderman 2 and Alan Wake 2 tonight. I have a 3 day weekend so I'm going to binge lol. These games are to good to pass up. 

[Dre801]

This has me salivating over the potential visuals for Control 2.

[Brian]

 

[ShreddieMercury]

My first impression after playing about an hour last night is extremely positive.  The presentation is off the charts, and it's by far the best looking game I've seen on my Series X to date.  As a fan of Remedy's games, Alan Wake 2 is already really going places in the intro alone.  Only thing to note is a strange audio bug that has cut the sound a couple of times in the intro cutscene, but a restart seemed to fix it. 

 

Also, 30fps is completely fine for games like this, so I would go quality mode on console if you're playing it there.

[legend]

This game isn't helping my desire to upgrade my computer now instead of waiting for the 5000 series. (Haven't played yet, but basing that on the videos and requirements)

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Alan Wake 2 PC: how demanding is it - and what hardware do you need?

WWW.EUROGAMER.NET

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The best settings for Alan Wake 2 on PC, focusing on rasterisation performance.

 

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There's a few things to get out in the open straight away. First of all, the medium preset does not mean that all settings are run at the medium quality level. Secondly, the names of the various presets mean very little anyway - based on our setting-by-setting testing, the PS5 version of Alan Wake 2 in its performance mode is essentially running with all settings at their minimums, backed by medium/high textures. Crucially: it still looks great.

 

So let us start with some cold hard facts. For one, the game runs at 1440p FSR 2 balanced mode on PlayStation 5 with a flat resolution and no signs of dynamic resolution while targeting 60fps. This should already be throwing up massive red flags to anyone with common sense about the whole controversy with the RTX 3070. How is the PS5 running the game at 1440p balanced mode FSR2 at 60 fps when we know quite well that an RTX 3070 is better at rasterisation and far better in ray tracing than a PS5?

 

Another cold hard fact is that at even at medium settings Alan Wake 2 is doing a lot of things last generation games never did - even without hardware ray tracing or path tracing, this game delivers visuals beyond nearly every title released so far. Let me give you some examples - in Alan Wake 2, even with ray tracing off, the game is doing ray tracing, just in software. It's visible in the game's reflections, for example, where the fallback below screen-space reflections uses similar technology to Unreal Engine 5's Lumen .

 

Additionally, even with ray tracing off, the game has an extremely robust software global illumination system. On the highest settings, even things like specular reflections and occlusion in character hair are influenced by area light sources with the software global illumination. Let me tell you, that isn't computationally cheap and the game's global illumination is one of the reasons why it looks so ridiculously good - even without ray tracing.

 

The last thing to say about Alan Wake 2's graphics is that it uses mesh shaders on PC and Xbox Series consoles and a similar system on PlayStation 5. Mesh shaders are used to fine-grain cull away geometry that the player cannot see from their view perspective to reduce the cost of the rendering and here Alan Wake 2 uses those cost savings to ridiculously pump up the geometry quality of everything on-screen.

 

 

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All of which brings us back to putting some thought into settings management, which is where we present this table. We've spent days matching up PlayStation 5's visual quality characteristics across both of its modes with the PC version of the game. If the game looks wonderful on PS5 - which it does - it stands to reason that Remedy has optimised settings of its own in balancing features with resolution and performance.

 

You'll note that the medium quality preset in the PC version is remarkably close to PS5's quality mode, with the main exception being post-processing quality. This is actually crucial to achieving good performance. Low quality post-processing renders effects like motion blur and depth of field at native resolution, while high quality post-processing carries out the same task after upscaling, meaning that the computational cost is far higher - often with no visual difference.

 

 

 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Minor information on the announced paid expansions:

 

Alan Wake 2 Dev Remedy Confirms Two Expansions Coming in 2024 - IGN

WWW.IGN.COM

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Alan Wake 2 is set to receive two expansions in 2024, developer Remedy has confirmed.

 

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Expansion 1 is called Night Springs, and is currently due out late spring 2024, although in a note to IGN Remedy said that release window is subject to change. Expansion 2 is called The Lakehouse, which is yet to receive a release window.

 

Here’s the official blurb on Night Springs:

 

“Visions and dreams. Fiction is written and coming true. Fiction collapses and remains just words on a page. These are those stories... in Night Springs. Play as several familiar characters from the world of Alan Wake and experience the unexplainable in multiple self-contained episodes of Night Springs, a fictional TV-show set in the world of Alan Wake.”

 

And here’s Remedy’s detail on The Lakehouse:

 

“The Lake House is a mysterious facility situated on the shores of Cauldron Lake set up by an independent government organization to conduct secret research… until something goes wrong. Explore the Lake House and embark on two separate adventures as the realities of Saga Anderson and Alan Wake collide again.”

 

 

[stepee]

Night Springs dlc sounds fucking amazing 

[skillzdadirecta]

Can't wait to start this later on tonight... I refuse to play this in the daytime.

[best3444]

I played 3 hours today. It's a detective investigation type game but it's really well done with terrific visuals and voice acting. 

 

I find myself getting lost a lot though because it's been really dark and rainy. I've only fought one monster in my time playing. Right now I'm stuck in what to do next so I took a break. It's definitely a cool game. 

[Mr.Vic20]

36 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Can't wait to start this later on tonight... I refuse to play this in the daytime.

Same! 

[best3444]

10 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

Same! 

 

It's definitely has a creepy factor to it perfect to play at night. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Your GPU is not worthy.

 

Testing Alan Wake 2: Full Path Tracing and Ray Reconstruction Will Punish Your GPU | Tom's Hardware

WWW.TOMSHARDWARE.COM

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The first game to launch with full ray tracing support.

 

Quote

 

Last month, Nvidia launched DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction with Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty (and the 2.0 update). Today, Alan Wake 2 arrives as the first full game to ship with so-called "path tracing" — full ray tracing for all the lighting, reflections, and more. It also includes DLSS 3.5 support, and the system requirements and base settings are high enough to raise a few red flags.

 

Alan Wake 2 requires DirectX 12 mesh shaders, sort of — the first game to do so. It potentially makes for a hard cutoff in terms of the minimum GPU necessary to run the game at all. Nvidia has had mesh shader support since the Turing architecture (RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series), while AMD only added that with RDNA 2 and later (RX 6000-series). Intel Arc GPUs also support the feature. What that means is you'll need, at a minimum, an Nvidia RTX GPU or and AMD RX 6000-series GPU, or Intel Arc. Officially, anyway, but we were able to run the game on an RX 5700 XT after skipping past the "no mesh shader" warning.

 

As you might expect given the above features and requirements, Alan Wake 2 represents a graphical tour de force that will punish even the burliest of GPUs. Upscaling is recommended at all settings, for example, though you can also opt for DLAA or FSR2 Native if you want — there's no way to turn off DLSS or FSR2 otherwise. But let's go ahead and jump to our initial benchmarks before we dig into the various settings and image fidelity.

 

 

Or maybe it is.

 

For such a gorgeous game Alan Wake 2 runs surprisingly well on budget graphics cards | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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This incredibly pretty game scales down to cheaper GPUs pretty well, actually.

 

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Between the exclusive RTX 40-series features required to run path tracing, and the mesh shaders snub for older graphics cards, you might be thinking that Alan Wake 2 isn't a very well-optimised game. That's not true, actually. This rather stunning videogame runs rather well on entry-level graphics cards.

 

It's true that Alan Wake 2 is stuffed full of high-tech graphics features, such as path tracing support, Frame Generation, and Ray Reconstruction. It's also true that once combined with a capable high-end graphics card, these make Alan Wake 2 one of the prettiest games I've seen yet. Though if you're willing to make do with less impressive-looking graphics, you can get by just fine with a modern, entry-level graphics card.

 

I've stuck the following budget-friendly graphics cards into our test bench to see what sort of performance you can expect out of Alan Wake 2

 

 

Unless your GPU is from AMD.

 

Alan Wake 2 is a stunning example of what the future of PC gaming looks like—but only on Nvidia | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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The RTX 40-series' features come together to make something beautiful in Alan Wake 2. I just wish it was something more players could experience for themselves.

 

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Alan Wake 2 brings together a lot of rendering techniques, tricks, and technical wizardry to create a game that feels—and I say this as a PC gamer through clenched teeth—next-gen. Dive into the settings menu and you'll find options for real-time ray tracing, path tracing, Ray Reconstruction, Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), and Frame Generation. The gang's all here.

 

For its extensive use of RTX technologies, Alan Wake 2 shines. It's gorgeously dingy. The lighting from sources across a scene penetrates even the deepest, darkest wood and highlights small details and terrifying scenes I don't care to talk about. Characters subtlety stand out from their murky environments, and fine details on their clothes occlude others and cast a neat shadow. There's a surprising vibrance to the deeply disturbing world of Alan Wake 2.

 

The catch? The game is more dependent on proprietary RTX features than any other I've played. This is Nvidia's dream—it's the sort of test case that shows off what happens when you get every piece of the rendering puzzle together.

 

 

Hey @Moa - PC Gamer did this just to humor you and me

 

You can run Alan Wake 2 on a 10-series or older graphics card, but you definitely shouldn't | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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I've stuck a GTX 1080 in our test bench and I just cannot get anywhere close to passable performance.

 

Quote

 

I've thrown a GTX 1080 into the PCG test rig to see just what sort of performance you can expect out of an older graphics card in Alan Wake 2. This ageing Pascal graphics card was first released in 2016, and as such isn't going to impress with a high frame rate in most modern games—not when compared to some monster like the RTX 4090, anyways. But it's still a decently capable card with just enough memory to see it through at 1080p or 1440p.

 

None of that matters. Without mesh shader support, this card can't do s**t in Alan Wake 2.

 

 

[Ominous]

I want to play this...but not at night in my basement. 

[Biggie]

2 hours ago, best3444 said:

 

It's definitely has a creepy factor to it perfect to play at night. 

Fuck that lol

[best3444]

This game is confusing me. I need to use a guide to advance where I'm at now. Hopefully there is some action soon, too. It's been an investigation through my two hours with no action what so ever. 

[stepee]

That’s how it’s supposed to open, so don’t feel bad about it. Soak it in, get ready.

[stepee]

Booted this for literally two seconds and realized it’s not a game I can “check out real quick” and turned it off to save the experience for tomorrow after I beat Spidey.

[best3444]

5 minutes ago, stepee said:

That’s how it’s supposed to open, so don’t feel bad about it. Soak it in, get ready.

 

Ok, awesome. I figured out what I need to do. Look forward to playing tomorrow!

[stepee]

10 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

Ok, awesome. I figured out what I need to do. Look forward to playing tomorrow!

 

I hope you watched. walkthrough of the first one before playing because it’s like..a lot

[best3444]

2 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

I hope you watched. walkthrough of the first one before playing because it’s like..a lot

 

I watched a story recap before playing. 

[stepee]

2 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

I watched a story recap before playing. 

 

I haven’t seen that but I hope it’s good, it took me about a two hour watch to feel caught up 

[Keyser_Soze]

1 minute ago, stepee said:

 

I haven’t seen that but I hope it’s good, it took me about a two hour watch to feel caught up 

 

It's not a lake it's an ocean.

[stepee]

1 minute ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

It's not a lake it's an ocean.

 

WHAT IF ITS NEITHER 

[Spork3245]

7 hours ago, Commissar SFLUFAN said:

Your GPU is not worthy.

 

Testing Alan Wake 2: Full Path Tracing and Ray Reconstruction Will Punish Your GPU | Tom's Hardware

WWW.TOMSHARDWARE.COM

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The first game to launch with full ray tracing support.

 

 

Or maybe it is.

 

For such a gorgeous game Alan Wake 2 runs surprisingly well on budget graphics cards | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

---

This incredibly pretty game scales down to cheaper GPUs pretty well, actually.

 

 

Unless your GPU is from AMD.

 

Alan Wake 2 is a stunning example of what the future of PC gaming looks like—but only on Nvidia | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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The RTX 40-series' features come together to make something beautiful in Alan Wake 2. I just wish it was something more players could experience for themselves.

 

 

Hey @Moa - PC Gamer did this just to humor you and me

 

You can run Alan Wake 2 on a 10-series or older graphics card, but you definitely shouldn't | PC Gamer

WWW.PCGAMER.COM

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I've stuck a GTX 1080 in our test bench and I just cannot get anywhere close to passable performance.

 

 

AMD is so unbelievably behind on RT that it’s kind of ridiculous at this point. A 7900 XTX is barely faster than a 10gb 3080 with RT on in this game. I cannot begin to imagine spending $1k or more on a GPU and it performing like a $700 GPU from over 3 years prior.

Intel needs to get its shit together and release some higher-end competitors in the GPU market, maybe that’ll wake AMD up and get nVidia to price a little better.

[stepee]

4 minutes ago, Spork3245 said:

AMD is so unbelievably behind on RT that it’s kind of ridiculous at this point. A 7900 XTX is barely faster than a 10gb 3080 with RT on in this game. I cannot begin to imagine spending $1k or more on a GPU and it performing like a $700 GPU from over 3 years prior.

Intel needs to get its shit together and release some higher-end competitors in the GPU market, maybe that’ll wake AMD up and get nVidia to price a little better.

 

No it’s fine ray tracing is just like an option you turn it off and it’s all fine and resolution is like whatever it’s cool don’t worry 

[Spork3245]

10 minutes ago, stepee said:

 

No it’s fine ray tracing is just like an option you turn it off and it’s all fine and resolution is like whatever it’s cool don’t worry 

Plus, low fps looks better anyway, more cinematic 

[gamer.tv]

I watched about half the IGN review which was enough for me to know I’ll be buying this.

[Spork3245]

An interesting tidbit in the DF video is that even with (hardware) RT off, the game is still using RT, just software based, for both reflections and (some) lighting. The entire process is extremely impressive, even at low settings.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Updated the reviews post:

 

 

[best3444]

Ok, 5 hours in and this is not an action adventure game. It's strictly a investigation game with searching clues throughout. I fought maybe 6 enemies in my playthrough. It's not an easy game for me because you are always trying to figure out what to do next. 

 

It's an extremely strange game that can be very confusing for an idiot like myself. 

 

The production values and visuals are incredible. It's just not an action game in any way. So I was getting a bit frustrated with constantly searching for clues and finding my way around mazes without exciting combat.

 

It's a quality title but definitely not my type of game. I'm still interested and I will beat it because I am at least interested in what's going to happen. 

 

Oh, and and the game is pretty scary and best played at night. 

[Keyser_Soze]

11 minutes ago, best3444 said:

The production values and visuals are incredible. It's just not an action game in any way. So I was getting a bit frustrated with constantly searching for clues and finding my way around mazes without exciting combat.

 

Well you did want a realistic vibe