Alan Wake 2 looks great on consoles too

Yesterday we brought you a review of Survival Horror Alan Wake 2, which received a full 10 out of 10. However, we rated the PC version, and you’ll probably be interested in the status on consoles as well. As usual, Digital Foundry took care of the in-depth analysis, in particular editor Oliver McKenzie, who first focused on the PS5 version. By the way, if you don’t want to spoil some moments, I recommend not watching the video.

The good news is that the game looks very good on this console. Be it lighting, details or character models. The PS5 version suffers a bit from shadows that don’t always look right. Annoying anti-aliasing caused by relatively aggressive scaling with FSR can also be a problem.

As for the differences compared to the PC version, then, of course, you will have to say goodbye to ray tracing or path tracing (full ray tracing), the console version relies solely on rasterization. Thus, you have to sacrifice better and cleaner reflections, better ambient occlusion and overall shadows. However, McKenzie adds that the lighting itself doesn’t change much, so the overall presentation of the game remains the same.

The game on consoles offers two modes: quality is 30fps at 4K resolution, which increases to a native resolution of 1270p, performance is 60fps, and output resolution is 1440p, which increases to 847p. Aside from resolution, the biggest difference is booth density.

The good news is that both modes are quite stable. The quality remains at 30 FPS and only in exceptional cases drops to somewhere around 27 frames per second. In Performance mode, the frame rate in difficult conditions is around 50 fps, otherwise it’s a smooth 60.