Alan Wake 2 PC: Non-RT Best Settings - Digital Foundry Optimised

so let us go through each and every single setting on PC to see where that PlayStation 5 in performance mode lands so let us start with the scattered ground detail setting on the medium settings preset on PC this is set to ultra as we can see here so yes the medium preset on PC doesn't just use flat medium settings it's merely a preset with the name medium looking at the PlayStation 5 version we can see that distant plant detail is not present here for example versus high and ultra settings we can also see there's less scattered grass on the ground than the high and ultra settings but it has more grass than low that makes PS5 a perfect match for medium here what about Shadows well at normal range it's easy to tell that PlayStation 5 is not using the high resolution Shadow setting but medium and low at this distance are a bit hard to tell apart when we're this far away up close though it's easy to tell PlayStation's Shadow resolution is a perfect match for PC's low setting here which is of course below the PC medium preset again which uses the medium setting the shadow filtering setting is more subtle and here that setting makes it so that Shadows edges as we can see here are more pristine when set to high so they get darker almost instead of being less diffused and on close examination we can see that PlayStation 5 has more diffused Shadows just like the medium setting so PlayStation 5 is medium Shadow filtering the shadow detail setting controls the amount of geometry at a distance in the shadow map so here in this shot we can see that the high setting onpc has his construction worker's Shadow being cast from him while the medium setting below that does not have his shadow here we can see PlayStation 5 matches PC's medium setting as the construction worker also lacks a shadow there and this is PC's lowest setting now let's move on to textures and terrain detail as we can see in this shot here PlayStation 5 uses the medium setting and above for textures medium and Ultra look functionally the same on PC but change vram caching Behavior low though uses a lower resolution textures as we can see on this photo here for the texture filtering though PlayStation 5 uses the low setting as found in the menu which reduces the an niobic filtering down to be close to the camera so textures lose their detail at a distance on PS5 in a very similar shot we can also see that PlayStation 5 uses the medium terrain detail setting on PC which lacks the bumpiness in the ground textures that is added when set to the high value on PC as we can see here another distant detail setting at medium is the LOD setting which changes how and when objects at a distance change quality as we can see here the branches on the tree on high have more detail than they have on medium at this camera distance PlayStation 5 is a perfect match for the medium setting here which is also the game's lowest setting for visual effects PlayStation 5 takes a similar approach to distant detail for screen space Reflections going from high to low increases the amount of grain seen in their Reflections here we can see that PlayStation 5 matches the grain amount and pattern of grain as found on PC's lowest setting in this screen space reflection on this window here same with the global reflection option which controls the software R traced Reflections here we we can see how the low setting adds in Grain and lacks some extra distance detail that is found on high PlayStation 5 is once again a perfect match for that low setting the last settings can be a bit more subtle sometimes fog quality for example at a glance is subtle on high there is no longer a fine line drawn across the Horizon on the water when fog is on the water as the fog is now reflecting in the water so they look like a mirror of each other medium fog has that line on the horizon and so does PlayStation 5 thus making it medium volumetric lighting increases the resolution of volumetric effects which at times can look a little weird as we can see here because some of the volumetric effects in this game are of a low sample count but it is easy to see based upon the shape and fuzziness of the effect that it gets fuzzier the lower it gets and PS5 matches the low volumetric light setting in terms of fuzziness the volumetric spotlight setting is even subtler forgive the intense Zoom here as I'm trying to be spoiler-free but basically you can see that there's added in aliasing in the the a beam of this conical flashlight here in the distance on low that isn't there to the same degree on medium or high PS5 has the same aliasing here as low making it a good match for it second to last we have the global illumination setting and here we can see from going from high to medium the game specular GI starts to affect stuff like hair which you can see when I flip back and forth between medium and high rapidly you can see that high gets darker with nice occlusion in that hair that is just missing on medium here we can see PlayStation 5 is lacking that nice occlusion like we see on high so it is around medium or low and this one I'm going to Peg to medium as I cannot see any differences between low and medium and all the other scenes I tested in terms of material response so I would say PlayStation 5 here is medium based on the lack of evidence to the contrary the last setting is post-processing quality here this option changes where post-processing is in the rendering pipeline either at the resolution before dlss and FSR 2 on low or after dlss or FSR 2 on high so at Native res when set to low as we can see here in this looping shot we can see that FSR 2 in bounce mode at 1440p sees flicker in the depth of field on low that is not there to the same degree as on high as we can see PlayStation 5 has flicker as well so I'd put it at the low setting here and with that we have the PlayStation 5's performance mode settings it's a game that looks pretty good I would say on average on the PS5 it is using the lowest settings for very many things but that is just the name low doesn't mean much here the game is goodlooking crucially we can see how the medium preset in comparison leaves a lot of things a good deal higher in quality but I'll get back to that fact very shortly putting the RTX 370 next to the PlayStation 5 in a moment when it dips below 60 FPS so we can measure its performance while we can see that the RTX 3070 outperforms it in this view by nearly 50% so yeah the PlayStation 5 is not magic or anything like I posited at the beginning of this video and this game scales in a way that actually makes a lot of sense when you use reasonable conso like settings given the PlayStation 5's performance profile as covered by Oliver in his video we can easily expect the RTX 370 to be healthly above 60 FPS at all times due to the performance disparity we see here the PlayStation 5 really only dips down to like the low 50s at worse when playing the game so that means we have more Headroom on the 3070 here to improve IQ or settings further but before I get to improvements over console let's take a look back at those settings again take a note of the things that are different between medium and PlayStation 5 performance mode and I want you to look at the postprocessing Quality this is the setting why remedy most likely low balled the 370 so much like I showed off earlier when this setting is put too low postprocessing is done before dlss or FSR 2 but guess what that has a huge performance cost even in scenes like this one here where the visual difference is going to be invisible there's a pretty big 17% performance lost here and we're getting close to 60 FPS suddenly on the RTX 3070 even though in gameplay you're not going to see a difference so yes if we're going to optimize our settings above those on the PlayStation 5 we will adjust those that have the biggest visual impact for the least performance cost and let's do that for one we have anistropic filtering as we can see here it is relatively cheap on the RTX 3070 so there's no reason not to Max that out at high on PC another obvious win on PC versus PlayStation 5 is to just use dlss if you have an RTX card you'll get a minor performance win over FSR 2 and you won't get that fizzling flicker that you see on the PlayStation 5 version even at lower resolutions have set on PC FSR 2 in this game is pretty flickery honestly due to the vegetation and specular highlights and dlss just doesn't have that at all so yes use dlss if possible now for other setting wins above the consoles here I want to leave that up to you the viewer as it's going to be taste driven based upon what aspects of the visuals you want to clean up and how much performance head room you have based upon your GPU type there are two areas though where I think WIS could be worth it and I'm going to let you choose between them the first would be Shadow resolution on low as it is on Console I think it can be pretty rough bumping this one up to high electively could be worth the performance drop on your GPU on the RTX 370 as we're seeing here this is a great visual win that costs around 10% of the GPU limited performance another possible upgrade over console would be in Reflections first with SSR quality it's pretty grainy with the console settings if you put this up to high you could get a quality win here that is very significant but for a hefty 10% performance loss secondly for Reflections you can turn up Global reflection quality which will also cut down on the visual noise there and give you some more detail for just a small performance loss as we're seeing here realistically though you could choose between any of the upgrades I'm mentioning or a combination of them for example on the RX 370 on the left we're seeing PS5 performance mode settings with FSR 2 balanced mode that runs at 83 FPS on the right I've turned it to dlss balance mode instead of FSR 2 and I've increased astrop Bic filtering and the Shadows are set to high as well as Global Reflections and SSR and it's still above 60 FPS there hitting 65 so you could potentially have the room for all these improvements I just detailed for your optimized settings depending upon your GPU and what you consider good

Channel: DF Clips

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Id: P9lGBWPk8sk

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 28 2023