after 13 years since the original Alan Wake game Remedy has returned with the much anticipated sequel Alan Wake 2 and With this latest installment, Remedy once again keeps pushing the visual boundaries using its proprietary Northlight engine. this results in yet another remarkable technical achievement and one of the looking games this generation. however this also makes it one of the most demanding ones specially at the highest settings and resolution. that's why today in this video we'll go through each and every graphics settings and examine their performance visual impact , so let's get going. compared to Remdey's previous game Control, Alan Wake 2 provides more graphical settings to tweak. so let's start by taking a look at the
resolution upscaling and Image Quality. the game supports both DLSS and FSR
even for native rendering and there no TAA or any other form of Anti Aliasing. and here if we compare DLSS and FSR using Quality mode at 1440p , we can see the usual results with DLSS offering much stable image compared to FSR however DLSS is not perfect as it exhibits noticeable ghosting and smearing artifacts specially on thin objects and fine details which in motion causes shimmering and image breakup on these objects. and FSR 2 implementation at native resolution is completely broken as you can see here compared to DLAA , and even compared to FSR2 Quality mode we can see that native FSR 2 produces
a significant level of shimmering and flickering. so there is an issue with the native
implementation of FSR 2 in this game. Moving on to Post processing Quality
this one controls the quality of Post Processing effects such as Depth Of Field , like here we can see more flickering with Low compared to High and performance wise during normal gameplay this setting have a big impact with no additional visual improvments like here where going from Low to High costs around 19% , so for this one I recommend Low. when it comes to the Texture Resolution setting Alan Wake 2 is similar to control
as this setting mainly control the amount of allocated Vram more than the quality of textures
like here you can see that all options have similar texture quality and the only difference is the allocated and used Vram. but there are few objects that can get
affected by this setting , like here with this pistols manual , where low have low res textures compare to other options. Texture filtering adjusts the quality
and the clarity of textures when viewed from an opaque angles like here and as usual this setting has negligible performance impact , so keep it at High. Volumetric Lighting controls the quality of volumetric effects. like here with these light shafts , where Medium and High look more defined compared to low. and these volumetric effects are used heavily throughout the game. which makes this setting among the most demanding ones. because here going from Low to Med costs around 4% and to High 18% , so for this one I recommend Low or Med. Volumetric Spotlight Quality is similar to the previous one but for spotlights and it's really hard to notice the visual affect of this setting. the only area where I noticed a visual difference is here during the prologue where we can see that this shaded line inside the light of this flashlight looks more defined and stable when using Higher options
and during this moment there is around 3% performance cost between Low and High however, in other areas like here , I measured around 5% cost between Low and High so here giving that it's quiet challenging to notice the visual difference between the options, I suggest keeping this one at low. next we have Global illumination Quality , now Alan Wake 2 relies on pre-backed and fine tuned Global Illumination that produces excellent and high quality indirect lighting. with light convincingly bounces throughout the environment resulting in a stunning visual presentation. and this setting doesn't have a profound impact on the overall quality of the game's GI. it primarily Adjusts the Light Probes density. like here where High makes the light interact more objects in a scene unlike Low and Medium. and performance wise there is like 2% cost when going from low to High, so here I recommend High Global Illumination. And unlike Global Illumination , the game struggles when it comes to Shadows Quality. even with High, sun shadows in particular exhibit low res appearance causing them to stand out noticeably. and here for sun shadows both Low and Med look flickery compared to High and when it comes to Local Shadows , Medium closely resembles the quality of High with high res shadows unlike low and on the performance side Going from Low to Med costs around 2% and to High 11%. so Here I recommend Medium , but if you have enough performance to spare go for High Shadows. Next we have two settings that should help cleanup these shadows first there is Shadow filtering which when set to high , it reduces aliasing and flickering
in shadows rendering as you can see here and this one has no performance
impact , so keep it at High. the second setting is shadow detail which should control the quality of geometric details used in shadows but I really couldn't find any visual difference between Med and High. whether for Close shadows like here or distant shadows and even the performance is almost identical between the two options , so here keep this one at High. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion is next this one adds soft shadows to objects
that are in close proximity to one another. which can significantly help ground these objects in the scene and improve the visual presentation , like here and SSAO in this game has negligible performance impact, so here I Highly recommend keeping SSAO enabled. Moving on to Reflections starting with Global Reflections
this one uses a form of software Ray Tracing to enable and manage the quality of the fallback
reflections when Screen Space Reflections fails
like here you can see how when I move the camera, the scene without Global Reflections exhibits typical artifacts associated with SSR , unlike the
other scene where Global reflections are enabled
and on the performance side enabling
these reflections costs around 12% and going to high decreases the level
of graininess in these reflections with no noticeable impact on performance.so Here I don't recommend turning off these reflections as doing so will negatively impact the game's visuals and will make most reflective surfaces look unnatural as you can see here. the second reflection setting is Screen space reflections or SSR. and here similar to Global reflections settings we can see that High helps
reduce the amount of grain on these reflections and on the performance side going from OFF to Low costs around 3% and to High 10%
so here I recommend Low SSR but if you have enough performance go for High specially with DLSS or FSR. next we have Fog Quality , this one mainly adjusts the thickness of the fog effect as you can see here when going from Med to High and performance wise I couldn't measure any significant difference between Med and High, so here I recommend High. Terrain Quality adjust the level of the ground bumpiness and it only affect forest terrains as you can see here as well as distance mountains like here. and this setting has negligible performance impact
so for this one I recommend High. Moving on to Far Object Detail , this one controls the game's geometric level of detail like here you can how medium has
more pop-in compare to High and performance wise in this scene going from Medium to High costs around 5%, so here I recommend keeping this one at High. and the last non Ray Tracing setting is Scattered object density. this one adjusts the density of Ground details and clutter such as grass , bushes and papers like here. and performance wise going from Low to Med costs 3% , to High 4% and to Ultra 9% , so here I recommend Medium or High. Now because of the context of this video and how demanding this game is even with rasterized rendering I won't delve deeply into Ray Tracing or Path Tracing, because if you want to optimize performance you won't be using any form of these effects in this game. so let's briefly talk about each Ray
Tracing setting starting with Direct Lighting. this one mainly enables Ray
Traced Shadows as you can see here which significantly enhance the image quality giving that the game has poor regular shadows. and here at this scene enabling Direct Lighting costs around 31%. and to denois these RT Shadows ,
we have several quality options in addition to DLSS Ray Reconstruction
and here we can see that DLSS Ray Reconstruction does a great job at cleaning RT Shadows , even better than the High quality Denoiser and performance wise going from Low denoiser to DLSS Ray Reconstruction costs around 11% and to the High denoiser around 65%. next we have Path Tracing , now unlike Cyberpunk 2077, Path Tracing in Alan Wake 2 only
affects the indirect lighting aspect of the game meaning it particularly affects Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination , in addition to Reflections. now giving that the game already has great looking indirect lighting , Path Tracing IMO doesn't add a lot when it comes to Global Illumination
and Ambient Occlusion as you can see here however when it comes to Reflections like here Path Tracing has a big visual impact and on the performance side going from off to Low
costs around 42% to Medium 44% and to High 52% and similar to Direct Lighting ,
we have a setting that controls the denoising quality of Path Tracing effects and here we can see one again that DLSS RR produces better looking results
compared to even the High Quality Denoiser and performance wise going from low to Med costs around 3% to DLSS Ray Reconstruction around 9%. and to High denoiser a massive 72%. and finally we have Transparency , this one when enabled adds Reflections to transparent surfaces like bodies of water or Cars windshields and windows as you can see here. and performance wise this is the cheapest Ray Tracing effect as going from Off to Low costs around 18% and to High 19%. now there are some additional settings that are not visible in the game graphics menu and can be changed using the game's config file
you can find this file by pressing the windows key and R on your keyboard and type this command in the run window after that go to Remedy , Alan Wake
2 and here you'll find this file called Renderer open it in any text editor and here you'll find a lot of things to tweak for example this one called m_bLensDistortion
when set to false disable the lens distortion effect which is quiet similar to
the Chromatic Aberration effect and doing so really improve the clarity
of the game as you can see here
we also have this one called
m_bDepthOfField which disable depth of field completely when set to false or this one m_bVignette which disable the vignette effect or the darkening around the borders of the image and there many other settings here and I'll leave what each one does at the description down below. now based on everything we saw so far , these are my Recommended Settings. let's now compare optimized and the highest settings performance. and I'm running the game at 1440 using DLSS Quality Mode with no Ray Tracing effects on both sides. here at this forest area which is one of the most demanding areas in the game we can see that on average Optimized settings
boost performance by around 56%. and here in the city area which is less demanding we see on average a smaller difference around 33% between the
Optimized and the highest settings. And with that we reach the
conclusion of this video thank you so much for watching and for your time. if you enjoyed the video leave a like and if not leave a dislike.
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