Alan Wake 2: Best Ray Tracing Settings - Digital Foundry Optimised

coming to optimization for this path tracing I chose the RTX 380 as it's still a rather common GPU out there and it's still really powerful at the same settings as the PlayStation 5 for example we can see it achieving nearly two times the performance of the PS5 which is awesome to see and I think ampere gpus are really doing well this game and outpacing older Generations but watch what happens when I Max the path tracing options with dlss reconstruction at that same resolution and otherwise same settings yep the performance goes way down you would essentially be looking at a 30fps experience in this game at these settings if you wanted to Max it out arguably you could but I want to offer an alternative for 60fps with rt so let's go through the settings first you have the quality settings for the indirect path tracing which control the amount of specular bounces visible and diffuse bounces we'll start with Reflections here we can see ranged from low to high how there are less Reflections in the reflections the lower you go at the high quality level we get all three bounces at low and medium there appears to just be one bounce of specular lighting and you can see a more matte tone in the reflection of that phone booth the difference between medium and low for specular quality is the reflection resolution that appears to be half resolution or so at low and full resolution at medium and we can see that affecting the quality of smaller details in the reflection like the text and symbols visually I would say low is actually a good optimized setting here for diffuse lighting quality we see something similar I would say here even at the low setting with its limited bounces of light we can still see a good amount of light bounce occurring the blue light is bouncing off the bowl onto the table and window sill at the higher settings like medium and high we can see more resolution and bounces there which increased the contrast and indirect Shadows and Light in the bowl but honestly I still think it looks pretty good at low here and I would say if the performance is good enough which we'll talk about very soon then it's a great optimized setting for the transparency tracing there's a quality switch here from low to high which you can see reduces the tracing resolution of transparency in motion it means the low setting is just more unstable in comparison to the high setting but I would say the low setting here is a good candidate for optimize settings for direct lighting you only have an on andof switch but there is control of its denoising and here I want to show you something interesting here are the three denoisers for direct lighting they all look kind of different and it's hard to say actually which one is most accurate as we don't have a ground truth example here to say what is most accurate so it's a matter of taste but the most important thing to notice is that the performance is way different between them the den noising set to high will half the frame rate in comparison to Ray reconstruction or the denoising set to low here for such things as Shadows I prefer the look of Ray reconstruction and given its performance it makes a lot of sense to use it on an Nvidia card or low if you're not on an Nvidia card for the 3080 though this test that I'm showing is very important as it shows us that even at PS5 settings and only using RT direct lighting with the low noiser were just about 60 FPS or so so if you're going to add in any of the indirect lighting we would definitely be way below 60fps so for something like the RTX 380 I actually only recommend doing RT direct lighting and using Ray reconstruction if you're going for a 60fps experience recommended settings get more interesting though when I drop in an RTX 470 here and here we can see at those PS5 settings that I showed off earlier it underperforms next to the RTX 380 it runs on average 14% slower than it at the same setting but if you compare it with the full path tracing Suite enabled and with Ray reconstruction at those settings and res while we can see the tables flip 470 is now outperforming the 380 by 26% at 41 FPS while the 380 is just a bit above 30 here my recommendation for 4070 tier gpus is to turn on indirect path tracing options and transparency to low to save some more performance and then turn on frame generation when doing that the game is now at 80 FPS as we're seeing here and this is one of the heaviest areas in the game it is a great deal faster as we're seeing here in the nonforest areas running at and above 100 FPS for example so it's a pretty great experience but I would still say it's actually not perfect depending upon your input device now it's a bit hard to show off in this video but the game controls really well on a controller as I'm showing here but with a mouse if you're not at a frame rate divisible by 30 the game can have stuttering with camera motion using a mouse just like it did in death Loop now I don't like this at all and I think this is something that remedy really needs to fix and as soon as possible getting over to Ray reconstruction I have the same appreciation of it as I saw in saber Punk 2077 more or less Reflections in motion are much better than the standard D noising that is provided they really make the game look a lot better here where we can see the olden noiser smearing in comparison to the really crisp look that we see there with Ray [Music] reconstruction the same with rapid lighting changes which look Snappy and natural with Ray reconstruction on but look a lot less responsive and a bit weird with Ray reconstruction off and cyberpunk you might recall that I said that it looked artificially sharpened at points in time and I'd say that is lessened to a degree in Allen wake but it's kind of hard to say exactly why that is the case but I still see that oversharpening occurring and a great place to point it out is in character faces where the sharpening aspect kind of over highlights normal maps on people people's faces and makes their skin look a bit odd it kind of destroys the subsurface scattering and a scene like this one with Alex Casey's character I actually think Ray reconstruction is not a detriment to the realism of the material on his face I think it looks pretty great here but in other scenes like we can see here I want you to notice how the ray reconstruction effect is killing the subsurface gettering on alen wake's skin here making it look papery and kind of wrong as it's overemphasizing the normal Maps this sharpening is something that I think really needs to be worked on for future iterations of Ray reconstruction as I find it a noticeable blemish on otherwise good results another thing I want to see improved is the oversharpening that can occur the lower the internal resolution is at lower dlss presets like we're seeing here the game can have a more obvious posterized look than it has at higher dlss presets like I said earlier I think this game doesn't look as oversharpened as cyberpunk does but I still can see some of the Hallmark issues that I saw in cyberpunk including a number of times seeing Trails behind objects with Ray reconstruction on and I really want to see this Tech improve for the future but it is otherwise really great in this title and all the shots you've seen in this video have been with Ray reconstruction on

Channel: DF Clips

Views: 17,427

Keywords:

Id: 79rFbwLQQeg

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 07 2023