Alan Wake 2: A Generation-Defining Game For PCs and Consoles

uh first news story I guess has to be Alan Wake 2 which um well we were expecting great things from it but I think the bottom line is that um it's not just a technological showcase but the review reactions to the game have been absolutely phenomenal Metacritic is currently above 90 uh there's a huge array of 10 out of 10 nine out of 10 for the game I've got to say I'm hugely thrilled for remedy this is richly earned rich deserved the game is incredible uh certainly in terms of digital foundaries um sort of audience statistics uh based on just the first video we put up St stacked up against our first Spider-Man video it's right up there so this is like big awesome this is is just incredible uh John I'm going to go to you first let's talk about the game just generally first of all um obviously it's now weapons free we can say whatever we like about it what would you like to say what's your big takeaway for Alam mik too okay there's there's three sort of let's bust out the John pillars shall we there's three pillars on which this game is is built that I I find very compelling uh there's the visual side there's the game itself and then there's the storytelling right and I think I know me it really Nails these three elements in ways that is that are both expected as a remedy fan but also surprising as one as well which is what I didn't expect so obviously uh well let me start with the other stuff first then we'll get to the graphics I I I'm a big fan of what remedy's always done they always try to sort of pull the rug out from under the player introduce fun new Concepts and sort of take you down this road of uh what's going on that sense of like confusion and wanting to know more you see interesting visual designs there's things that pop into the story you strange things happen you don't understand what's happening games are the perfect medium for this this is something that that I that used to be more common in games actually I mean this is one of the reasons I was a big fan of like say the metal gear games because they were all about this kind of stuff uh Silent Hill does this as well and remedy has always been great at it and Allan Wake 2 really pushes this to the next level because you're playing between these two characters Saga and of course Allan Wake himself and of course Max Payne is in there as well Mr Casey I guess actually uh and this it's kind of one of those games where there's layers of reality that you're exploring and the game takes you on this journey through these different layers and it slowly peels them back leaving you in this state of confusion yet Amusement if you will and I just find that stuff really compelling like it's it's much more so than Allen wake 1 Allen wake 1 plays well but it's actually my least favorite of Remedies games I would say uh because I feel it got very repetitive you're just running through the the landscapes for like hours shooting the same guys over and over and over again it gets very tedious I thought even though the core mechanics are good Allen wake 2 is nothing like that in fact it's so different that I was actually a little bit surprised where especially early on it starts more as almost an adventure game there's dialogue choices there's exploration you're piecing together puzzles you're going into sort of like figure out the the crime scene if you will uh and all this kind of stuff and then obviously Allen comes into the story and he too is figuring out like what's actually happening here and slowly but surely they introduce more shooting into the game but it's just this feeling of spiraling through some kind of like uh portal into madness and I love that stuff but obviously the big thing for the digital Foundry side is the visuals and I'm just going to say it right now Alex I I don't want to spoil things too much but I'm going to spoil it this is the this is the best looking game of the year uh and probably one of the best looking games ever made uh this is this is a technical show stopper and I would say both on consoles and the PC which wasn't the case I would say with cyberpunk 2077 which we awarded our Graphics of the Year award in the past that was just for the PC version and while the PC version definitely is a step above I think they actually did do a great job with the console version as well and it's really just it's about the lighting lighting model here especially on PC but wow the path tracing just the way like there's the the way ambient light spills across the scene and sort of like you can almost feel the photons moving through the world bouncing off the surfaces it truly uh demonstrates the the whole concept of the world as just a series of mirrors that are more or less rough uh cuz everything is reflective as it should be from the most uh like the roughest surface to like the most mirror likee Sheen everything uh reflects correctly and it's awesome it's not always in your face necessarily it's it's often more subtle but like once you notice it it just starts to feel somehow more realistic in a way that I'm not used to seeing in video games anymore so or anymore I say I mean that I'm not used to seeing in video games full stop uh so there's a lot to do with this and I actually want to hear some some other thoughts here so Alex Alan best um no uh well it is very good Fe I don't know if i' called the best game I've ever had in my life but it is incredibly wellmade um uh in a lot of ways and just to talk about the technical things I think uh John hit it uh the nail right on the head there about uh being accomplished technically across Ross all the platforms we have yet to see Series S though um as of typing this so I can't say too much about that but I presume series X will be right up there with PlayStation 5 maybe it'll have differences in performance kind of like we saw in control when that released um I can't say anything about that yet cuz I haven't there's no there's no photo mode in this game though Alex that was one thing that so disappointed me while doing this because I wanted to make I want to see what I can do next week uh cuz I'm going to be working on another video covering the path tracing and R tracing recommended settings and all those kind of things and maybe a little bit more holistically about the game but I want to show like the how dense like the geometry is how dense the lighting interactions can be but your camera only gets so close you know and that that's that's that's a bit of a bummer always so I'm going to have to see what we can I don't know I don't it's got to be that uh that control thing when when you highlighted the performance difference between the consoles using photo mode yeah it's got to be that that was very controversial there was lots of comments like uh we're benching photo mode here Bening photo mode what are you guys doing over there bunch of jackalopes we should it should be pretty easy to see any performance differences right in the beginning of the game if there's any between Xbox series X and PS5 because there's bits in the beginning of the game that that the not the very very beginning but the four sections in the game are heavier than other sections and I think that's borne out a bit some of the benchmarking that's being done where if you Benchmark like the town or some areas where Allen wake is there's not the like vegetation is always really expensive to render so it's definitely expensive here as well too um but on the tech level it looks really good on any platform currently that I've seen that you can play it on uh the lowest settings on PC are like the high settings in other games and I think that's one thing uh that we'll talk about a little bit later where even if you turn down the settings in this game you're going to get a really good-looking game and that isn't the case for everything it wasn't the case in the original crisis you you know you turn down the graphics in the original crisis uh they scale to like lower than Far Cry it didn't run that well always but you can really make that game super ugly on the low settings here the low settings only go so far because they want to keep obviously a lot of the artistic value in the game without letting you go full potato mode uh but it still runs really well I would say given the hardware they're also using mesh shaders or primitive shaders on PlayStation 5 and actually when we were at Gamescom uh I did talk with Tatu Alto about this who was their TD technical director and he mentioned that they were using mes shaders or the equivalent of uh primitive shading on PlayStation 5 which is something that rdna 1 has it's very close to mesh shading just doesn't have like the amplification stage that's about it um and they're they're using to find grain callway geometry using meets which is a way to like break up the geometry of an object so you can get like really like fine understanding of where the the vertex edges are and where the geometry is so you can call away the stuff you don't see the player doesn't see this is all good stuff because that means you can pump up the geometric quality everywhere across the world and I think that's really evident in Allan Wake to where almost every object you walk up to it's super dense in terms of geometric quality it's one of the first things that I noticed uh not in the opening cut scene but the one thereafter just like a lot of the stuff going on and uh that's without even talking about the path tracing I'm just very happy with the technical quality of the game at release um and that is in spite of the uh I would say like feverish hate that the game got for uh putting out recommended specs um there's a lot to talk about that rich I don't know would you want to say something about the recommended spec situation yeah I mean basically uh and I think remedy itself said post embargo that they were somewhat conservative with their kit recommendations um the minimum kit requirement um on the AMD side is the rx66 600 which I find to be a really interesting GPU because you know there's not so many decent gpus you can buy these days that are sub 00 this thing's been as low as 180 for ages right and so you know this is a minimum spec um uh GPU which remedy has specified so I thought I'd give it a go and I'm not going to make it easy uh on the on the on the GPU here I just dialed in exact PlayStation uh specification settings for the quality and the performance modes so you know basically it's like 1270p uh medium high low hybrid for the quality mode and uh FSR 2 scaling up to uh 4K uh quality sorry performance mode is basically um minimum settings uh 1440p output I think it's 870p internal resolution and you know bearing in mind you know it's not going to be as good as a PS5 right but it's not a million miles away so you know that quality mode alternative a 6600 is not a 4K card but this is what we're forcing it to do still doing 27 frames per second average across this sort of uh foliage heavy bench uh can go low of course it can go higher um but you know it's not bad um the performance mode uh equivalent basically 52.9 FPS so you know that's just kind of nuts good um for you know bearing in mind uh remedy are specifying like 720 P30 on low for this GPU I believe based on the recommended specs it's obviously much higher you also see there that I've done a third um uh run which is essentially 1080p FSR 2 quality mode which is kind of what you would be using this GPU for and um I believe it's the quality mode I'd need to check but it's 56 .2 frames per second there and you know that's for 1080p GPU that's sits well within the vrr window on a 60 HZ display this is this is really good stuff so yeah I do think they were somewhat conservative uh which might have stoked some of the hate in terms of the uh in terms of the specifications man I hate to I hate to th use that word hate though it's more just like people being upset that their systems can't run a game and I understand where they're coming from but was that it though but that it I think it was more about no so like there I think I really think it was a very low amount of people being like I have a 1070 and I want to play this game I think a lot of it a lot of the comments I saw were about a very different discussion yeah I think a lot of the comments were about I'm playing at 1080p performance mode on a 3070 which is what it said it was basically saying like one dlss FSR 2 are recommendations here and um the concept of what is medium was very insulting thing as well too to I think a lot of people that read those specs and then commented on it okay so that's what I that's what I read it's the ageold problem of uh they don't like the names of the presets they get I also saw I did actually see if we do want to use the word hate I do I did see some thrown around towards the Reconstruction people are really anti- dlss and FSR and I just don't get it uh because they they take over it's going be one of these TAA situations where people are just going to accept it over time simply because guess what guys if you want an in you know a big leap in Fidelity if you want the developers to aim high you've got to understand that it's about quality of pixels not quantity of pixels and and yes um upscaling techniques are the mitigation strategy to make it work they and it's not as if it's a bad looking game well I was going to say it's like specifically with dlss I think dlss often looks better than the native solution like a native res TAA solution because it takes over the TAA duties basically and I think it does a better job at creating a more consistent coherent image uh with really clean edges especially on very fine detail correct me if I'm wrong Alex but remedy have actually dumped their own TAA solution and their own and their own upscaling solution and effectively you need to use FSR 2 as a baseline for upscaling right this is very true and also um both so there was some reporting out there that the game for forces you to use dlss ores 2 that isn't completely correct and the aspect of is you can always run the native resolution of both it using daa Andor FSR 2 native AA which is the new mode for FSR 2 that I think that was a Gamescom thing um but um so you can always run the game at Native resolution it's just a matter of whether or not it's worth it to run it at that native resolution given what it's giving you in comparison to other um graphical features you can tweak and that's always like the thing like obviously adding more pixels is going to somehow increase quality if you if you're comparing baselines of the same AA technique in use but is it worth it in comparison to having for example would you rather have uh slightly lower pixel density or would you have Reflections not disappearing off on screen you know like uh like turning on SSR versus turning on RT like what is more important to you as a player and the options allow you to do that in this game and I think people freaking out about the the settings we'll talk about meshers whatever later maybe but um but at least in regards to what is medium medium is just an arbitrary word to describe anything they for their for for whatever remedy decided they said medium is actually like a mix of high settings and alra settings and medium settings and some of those settings are much more expensive than others right so yeah that's the way it is I I there's I don't know what else to say about it but as a that they kind of hand handicapping themselves there though by calling medium medium but then using a mix of settings in within the preset because it does it it's just a wording thing it's just a wording thing although I do wish I wish they had gone all the way though and added like a potato mode it's like the low end which unfortunately thinking of potatoes I did see some people testing it trying to get it to run on Steam deck and thus far I have not seen anyone succeed with this I don't know I mean yeah that that'd be really hard to get it running on Steam deck because the game is ridiculously GPU heavy and I think then it would also start maybe taking away clocks from the CPU at that point so you might start running into other issues it's really with those power constrained devices it's really hard to throw ridiculously heavy content at them and get really uh good performance everywhere across the entire experience MH absolutely um yeah there is an extra wrinkle I mean we'll talk about the mesh Shader thing because I do think it is worth discussion Alex because um well fundamentally um we've kind of realized that there is a Day of Reckoning upon us where older gpus are not going to be able to effectively run new games but I'm not sure anybody ever predicted that it would be mes shaders that would be the defining factor that separates one generation of gpus from the the prior one I actually did some testing for you and it's m with ted8 ti 5700 XT and I put the 2080 in there as well the 2080 seems to I think generally underperform based on what it should be doing possibly but it does have the mesh shaders and it annihilates the 1080 TI 5700 XT seems to be well it's it's still obviously not running anywhere near as well as a PS5 but you know it seems to be doing a bit better uh one thing I did want to test though and I actually did this just before the direct and shared with you some results Al the 1660ti which is this kind of weird touring card that didn't have rt or um uh 10 censor cores it does have mesh shading and um you can in that again that foliage heavy sequence averaged 42.94 FPS 1080p FSR 2 qual uh quality mode but running on ps5s um performance mode presets which is effectively as low as they go across the board you know it's still it's perfectly playable on this really old GPU it's just because the mes shading part of it is in there uh which I found quite in but again it's it's still massively outperforming what um uh it is still massively outperforming um what remedy is saying a 6600 could do 7 720 P30 so wait rich I maybe I blanked and missed it but if you try to run this on a card without mes shading support what happens it does runes run but it's very very poor usually yeah basically the 5700 XT seem to be about I'd say sort of 50% of where you would expect it to be and the 1080 TI which should be faster I think the 5700 XT uh it's just really really running bad there's some really weird stuff going on you go into the Mind place and it drops down to like 12 frames per second 12 to 15 frames per second there's some weird stuff going on with Pascal Pascal's really not doing well so I'm actually curious because I know the Mind place is resident in the memory when you're playing the game wait is pal I think that's uh Sherlock Holmes isn't it they they've yeah they've tweaked it they say in the when you first access it hey I've done my own version of the m so they didn't keep the same name right yeah um but I I'm wondering if it's actually something that's off the map uh off the side of the map and because they don't have uh the mes shaders doing the calling anymore it's just like doing a really bad coling and you're actually rendering like the entire game alongside of it like behind it you know that's something that actually happen I could imagine if you're not using M shaders um but the 5700 XT holds up fairly well on that so yeah it it is a weird thing for sure but basically you know when they say when the when that little eror pops up saying uh you don't have mes shaders this is generally a bad thing um but you know if you do have mesh shaders and I include the 1660ti in there 1660 super any of those old touring cards without the RT cores you should be kind of able to get something fairly decent out of it I think you know bearing in mind that this is a really GPU heavy game but yeah it's fascinating stuff um do you want to say anything more about mesh shaders Alex it is a bit weird that it would be mes shaders that are that kind of dividing factor I didn't expect that to come first before an RT game just blowing everyone out of the water um but it is so fundamental to like the drawing of the game's rendering like it it's just it's like how do we do geometry do we use the old system which has existed since direct X9 with some modifications in dx10 and 11 or do we use something that is entirely programmable and very different and gives us more control and potentially quite a bit better performance um and they made that leap a lot of other devs haven't um another engine that has technically made the leap but offers a Vertex uh based uh they they have a fallback that is semi- performant is Onre engine f unre 5 actually uses mes shaders too for the triangles that are bigger than like I forget how many pixels um but this is the first time we've seen a game actually do this in a while and I'm very happy to see it like I I don't get te eyed when a seven-year-old GPU can't run the game I just don't anymore um the 5700 XT is an interesting one rich pointed out the fact that his performance is semi okay all things considered but I mean semi yeah it's it's like half yes semi um but uh that one is one where back when that GPU came out I think there was enough press at the time that said it doesn't have a lot of features that the competition has and that was actually part of the review process back then and there was an asterisk I think on the review saying like you won't be able to use these things eventually and this is the first time we're seeing it I don't think every title's going to do this people like alen wake 2 is remedy is yeah it's a special thing like it's going to take a little bit longer before we see mes shading it took this long it took five years after the introduction of mes shading to get the first title to actually really even use it like wow like that's so long in terms of direct de time usually these things are like one year a little less um so it's the first one of hopefully many over time but I don't think I think Alan wakes 2 is going to be special for a bit and then like maybe two or three years we might see another title we'll see Rich uh remind me here did you test the radi on 7 I think that's the most important one to know I that was the same year as the 5700 XT I think but it's like I think it's an older generation or is it I I mean I could I mean it's basically a d shrunk Vaga oh yeah yeah it is using the Vega architecture it's gcn it's it's old I mean I might you know you you've peaked my interest yeah right uh I mean it does have 16 gigs of memory but weirdly enough Alan Wake 2 seems to be quite you know as long as you turn off raid racing it's very memory seem to be yeah very memory efficient which I thought is is quite interesting um yeah I could give the rad on 7 ago that's just to see what happens there I mean it would be sort of like a faster Vega 64 I guess but uh yeah I mean you know it's just been really interesting to see this dividing line between you know GPU generations and there is the whole question I mean there's no doubt that there's still millions of 10 series cards in circulation but at some point they're not going to be good enough right I mean that's that's the bottom line and you know it's kind of akin to you know you're not going to if you're sitting there with your PlayStation 4 that you bought in 2016 you're not going to be playing Allan Wake 2 either no I I think the the 1080 the 10 series cards have had an exceptionally long life for PC Hardware up there I would argue with like I don't know famous cars like the 8800 GT maybe or I don't know there there's been others along the way that have been like this but it's a great card that has been very long lasting the GTX 970 that a that lasted for a while that was a classic and the 1080 yeah the 1080 is an amazing card it's gotten youve had seven solid years and it's not over yet right like just because a game like this comes along and doesn't really work on it doesn't mean that that's going to be the case going forward for every game right it's just it's starting to show its age but it's still perfectly usable mhm yeah absolutely yeah so you know I was kind of um yeah I was intrigued to see the actual PC results that were coming out based on the fact that the recommended specifications were very onerous you know and they did cause some concern um I guess the the the funny thing is is that the whole mes shading thing came out as a kind of PS in a tweet from a re staer as opposed to be being a part of the of the whole spec sheet so um yeah that was that was a bit of a a bolt out of the blue I think the Bott I'm sorry I think the bottom line though is that you know um in terms of scalability there is scalability here it is decent but there is a very much a cut off point where you know unlike many games there is no potato mode here you know if you whack down everything down to low it's still recognizably Alan Wake 2 it is basically the PlayStation 5 version in performance mode right it looks you know with a couple of extra tweaks here and there but it you know it still looks really really good so yeah it's sort of six of one half half dozen of the other really where it is a graphically intensive game and you know maybe some people are hearing well you know 1080p with upscaling low settings on a 1660ti it's 42.9 frames per second that's pretty low but it's it's not when you actually see what low settings is so yeah really interesting for me it's like uh beyond the GPU requirements and all that I just want to say that the experience of loading this up on PC was one of the most positive I've had in a while where it just I fired it up it loads super fast there's no weird stuttering hitching anything strange I mean I literally just started the game first time you know I'm using a high-end card so I put Max settings and decided let's see what happens and then I continued to play after that point I didn't have to restart the game I didn't have to fiddle with anything it just worked no hitching no weirdness none of the typical stuff we often see with day one PC releases the whole thing just felt like rock solid and awesome uh which I think is an impressive feat especially in 2023 where that cannot be assumed with a new pc rele assumed no um I still have yet to try I mean you tried the RTX 2080 Rich I'm going to drop the RTX 2070 super and at some point maybe it doesn't make it into the video depending on how much time I want to uh spend before I get it out because it's almost ready it's like the video is almost ready um but um but you know maybe that could be thrown into the article but I'm just very curious about how the RTX 207 super fares against the PlayStation 5 because we've seen that depending on the title it's like up down it's below it it really depends the testing I did for you um was before we had finalized console settings right so um uh it was on medium settings which is actually quite demanding yeah the the high the high post processing setting people the high post processing setting is super expensive and you probably don't need it just going to throw that out there it's it's one of the things that drags down performance a whole lot just for like better looking depth of field that's the big difference so it is good it is good looking depth of field though it is it's it's also it's high it's full resolution which it wasn't actually in in control so there's like a lot of things that are subtly better in alen Wake 2 other than just geometry and stuff like that just like uh the post-processing is higher quality in Alan Wake the other thing to mention is uh the ray reconstruction dlss 3.5 uh right we thought it did an amazing job at Gamescom but I noticed with cyberpunk when it actually did hit there is this sense that it it adds an almost AI upscaled waterc colory look to the visuals that I always found slightly off-putting so it has its benefits but it didn't look as good as I had hoped in practice but in Allen wake 2 it works flawlessly where the the image just feels Rock Solid it doesn't have any of that weirdness obviously it eliminates all the fizzle and and and other issues that it's designed to do and it really showcases that yeah maybe the cyberpunk Imp implementation needs a little bit more work to get to this point I'm not really sure what's going on there but it's definitely noticeable the difference could it be content I mean Alan Wake is Mally a a slower game right yeah but I it's hard to say it's hard to say too because I thought about this a bit I was like maybe there's less lights in Allan Wake 2 is one thing I thought of too so there's less noise to deal with for certain ARS I don't know but also the model is probably evolving uh to a little degree and maybe it currently fits some content better than others it's really hard to tell I would have to send a right couple of questions over to Nvidia to get an idea but since it is a black box it's pretty much impossible to know so right let's round off this discussion with a supporter question this one from roel hi DF crew the recent drama surrounding Al wake 2 requiring a GPU with res Shader support made me wonder when we might see other technologies that are currently optional become mandatory I guess the most obvious one here would be RT so at which point do you think that developers might start to rake RT the only option for certain graphical features without non-rt fallbacks could Spiderman 2's inevitable PC port in a year or two require RT given how it is used across all modes in the PlayStation 5 version or do you think nixus will still be adding some fullbacks for older Hardware well um Alex and indeed John I think that Spider-Man 2 already has those fullbacks in PlayStation 5 that is not used technically Reflections yeah they use it for secondary ref as we know I mean in in the first version of your review video for Spider-Man 2 you actually found a part of the game that was still using screen space Reflections Cube Maps yeah but they actually patched in you had to edit the video yeah I the video they they fixed that in a patch I had to remove that part yeah so there there's definitely still fallbacks in place the question I guess is how they're generated if it's the same way as it worked before because if if they kind of like push that out of the pipeline as of January of this year uh one has to wonder how good that fallback system actually would be when used across the entire game you know what I mean yeah yeah um yeah I mean Alex nixus are the masters of fullbacks and supporting older Hardware really aren't they yeah I mean maybe if they do want to support something like steam deck or Rog Ally um they would do this and they maybe would um go in there with some QA and art to fix it up because they've they've gone in there with art before to fix things up they do it for their 21 by9 and 32 by whatever modes uh they put in their games you know to clean up um both UI as well as any of the cut scene issues that could appear in these games so they do do art changes for these games nixes they're not just a straight porting studio um and I could almost feasibly see them doing that but at the same time I like I said uh a couple I think it was a couple DF directs ago it's going to be maybe two years from now it would be interesting if it was actually like a year from now that'd be very interesting but um I imagine it's still going to take longer just because this the way things are and by then we're going to have so many years of real-time rate tracing existing that I would hope we start seeing some titles just say actually we don't want to spend the QA time doing this actually just using an RT card I mean if the consoles can do it by that point and they'll be XX so old by then why can't your PC no five years I would love it if somebody uh T tried to troll the users with the fallback and all the fallback textures are just like the you didn't say the magic word Jurassic Park gift and you just see that in all the reflection it's just that til uh uh oh that'd be great I love that that that would not go over well I think not go well

Channel: DF Clips

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Length: 33min 15sec (1995 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 31 2023