Alan Wake 2: The community is pissed, because many of you will not be able to play the title

Even before the release of Alan Wake 2, the horror game is being hotly debated. New details about the PC requirements cause heated reactions from the community

The release of Alan Wake 2 is scheduled for October 27, 2023. In the days leading up to it, however, a discussion has been brewing around the PC system requirements of Remedy Entertainment”s survival horror game.

The trigger is the crisp graphics card requirements that the Finnish developer studio sets for Alan Wake 2. Because besides the upscaling requirement with Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR, older GPUs don”t seem to have a chance to get the game running at all.

GTX 1000 and RX 5000 look into the tube because of new engine

Background is a meanwhile deleted tweet of the Remedy employee (@newincpp). According to this, Nvidia”s Pascal generation as well as AMD”s first Navi series will not be supported in Alan Wake 2.

Certainly, these are the GTX-1000 series as well as the models of the RX-5000 series. With these you won”t be able to play the horror game.

Why does Alan Wake 2 have such high system requirements? The reason for this step is the reworked Northlight engine used by Alan Wake 2. This relies on mesh shaders instead of vertex/geometry shaders, which provides for more complex textures – and thus hopefully more beautiful games.

The catch is the hardware requirement for the (Mesh-Shader), because DirectX 12 with feature level 12_2 must be available for this. Nvidia only has this with RTX 2000 and upwards, while AMD is only compatible with Radeon RX 6000 and newer.

If we go by current results of the (Steam Hardware Survey), buying Alan Wake 2 is out of the question for some gamers, after all, the GTX 1060, for example, is still in the top five most popular GPUs.

Alan Wake 2 with less performance-hungry vertex shaders? Although according to (@newincpp) Remedy Entertainment had been working on an alternative implementation with vertex shaders, it was riddled with so many performance problems and bugs that the developer studio stopped working on it altogether.

Accordingly, there is a small glimmer of hope to somehow get Alan Wake 2 running on the supposedly too old graphics cards using mods. But according to a post on Reddit, gamers should not get their hopes up unnecessarily.

The Reddit post itself primarily focuses on AMD”s RDNA-1 generation, which is not officially supported. Possible mods, on the other hand, are also not options, since many bugs are to be expected.

Alan Wake 2 does not support RDNA1 (5000 series) cards according to developer
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The feedback from the community is disappointing, as expected. Even though Remedy has proven with Control, among others, that they bring beautiful games to the market, the lack of optimization is an impertinence

The timing of this announcement is also criticized, as telling a good portion of the gaming community a week before release that they won”t even be able to play Alan Wake 2 is bad communication

Nvidia showcase for Alan Wake 2: Without DLSS 3.5, smooth gaming becomes a challenge

Fitting to the discussion around steep requirements, graphics card manufacturer Nvidia has published the first (home benchmarks for Alan Wake 2).

The focus is of course on the RTX-4000 series, which was tested in the common resolutions – i.e. Full-HD, WQHD and UHD. In addition, a comparison of the frame rates with and without DLSS 3.5 is drawn.

What does the Nvidia showcase say about Alan Wake 2? Even in the still widely used Full HD resolution, it becomes apparent how much graphics power Alan Wake 2 demands. Without DLSS 3.5, not even an RTX 4070 Ti manages to exceed the 60 FPS limit. At least the AI upscaling lets all listed graphics cards crack this mark.

A similar picture is drawn by the 1440p and 2160p resolutions: Without DLSS 3.5, the common 30 or 60 frames per second are feasible with the wickedly expensive RTX 4090 at best; the rest of the Nvidia GPUs have to compulsorily resort to upscaling.

At least the associated YouTube video, which Nvidia recorded in 4K resolution with Ray Reconstruction and DLSS 3.5, promises a graphically respectable game.

Alan Wake 2 isn”t the only game in October that has to deal with accusations of poor optimization, by the way. The recently released Cities: Skylines 2 also has massive performance problems even on high-end computers,

Now it”s your turn: Do you think Alan Wake 2 is a poorly optimized game, or can you understand why only the latest graphics cards come into question based on the Nvidia showcase? Would you upgrade your computer for Alan Wake 2 or does the PC version fall through the requirements for you? Let us know in the comments!

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