One of the strengths of last year’s Survival Horror Alan Wake 2 was undoubtedly its graphics. After Cyberpunk 2077, it was only the second major modern game to implement path tracing, and the very first game to use mesh shader technology, although it has been available in DirectX 12 Ultimate for several years.
It’s the latter that has led to hardware requirements being higher than usual, as DirectX 12 Ultimate is only supported by Nvidia GeForce RTX 20 and above, AMD Radeon RX 6000 and above, or, of course, Arc A from Intel. And although the game eventually launched even on the very popular GTX 1060 at the time, the frame rate was extremely low.
However, this will soon change. The developers decided to work on optimization this week will arrive a new update that will lower the minimum hardware requirements. Remedy is now introducing the Nvidia GTX 1070 and Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards, originally the RTX 2060 and RX 6600 cards, respectively.
Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry was able to test the patch in advance and the results were very positive. Additionally, the performance gain depends on the power of your graphics. In the most demanding environments, it’s 45% for the GTX 1060, 57% for the GTX 1070, the GTX 1080 offers an 85% increase, and the GTX 1080 Ti even doubles the frame rate compared to the old version of the game. Some locations were clearly broken back then, so Mind Place, for example, runs up to three times faster even on a GTX 1060.
However, this is not a universal performance increase. Don’t expect the Radeon RX 500 cards to still hit frame rates, and the RX 5000 didn’t have too much of a performance boost. On the other hand, the game worked better on them than on Pascal (GTX 10). Don’t worry even if you still have old graphics. When DF’s Richard Ledbetter tried to run the game on the GTX 970, the image was completely broken and everything was flickering.
On the contrary, it is interesting that some modern graphics cards also benefit from optimization, especially the Lovelace series (RTX 40). For example, with the RTX 4070, Battaglia saw a 14% increase in performance and a 6% increase with path tracing enabled.
We’ll be releasing an update to the PC version of Alan Wake 2 later this week. This will lower the minimum GPU specs to GeForce GTX 1070 / Radeon RX 5600 XT.
Check out Digital Foundry’s report on this before launch! https://t.co/ZTLpi5rjrF
— Alan Wake 2 (@alanwake) March 4, 2024
Source :Indian TV
