Alan Wake 2 PC Performance Test: AMD GPU Edition! Low, Med, High, FSR, RT, Path Tracing all tested!

hey look that's me in my previous video talking about Allen wake 2 PC performance versus the uh very demanding system requirements list and the biggest comment I'm seeing in that video is people would like to see some AMD gpus I'd like to do that as well and that's what we are going to do here um however one thing to note one reason why I hadn't done that in the last video was I just ran out of time honestly the other reason was um you know Nvidia gave me the day one driver access early for this game so I was able to use their Allen wake specific drivers in that video I don't know if AMD is going to have a day one optimized driver for this game or not but I certainly don't have one at this point so just do be aware of that also uh I'll be testing the gpus in the system requirements list here in my Nvidia video I checked if the 10 series due to their lack of mesh Shader support could run the game performance was certainly bad uh but amd's 5000 series gpus also lack mesh Shader support and I would love to test that but I just want to mention I don't have any of amd's 5,000 series gpus to test so I will be unable to do that here but we will start at the RX 6600 go from there I do have all the cards on this list we'll see if I have time to do any additional ones uh let's go ahead and thank today's sponsor and then hop into the benchmarks a huge thank you to today's sponsor Galaxy lamps and I want to tell you guys about the Galaxy projector 2.0 that they sent over this thing is really cool uh I was setting this up to test it out and my kids would not let me play around with it and especially when you can get into the app you can adjust the colors adjust brightness set timers uh you can control the the lasers you get like laser lights and stars up on the seiling along with uh uh like a colorful nebula and this whole universe on your ceiling it's really cool my kids absolutely love this thing and best of all if you go to Galaxy lamps.co Danel oen you can get the Galaxy projector 2.0 while it's still on sale follow that link in the videos pinned com comment and or video description again that's Galaxy lamps c/d Danel Owen to get your Galaxy projector 2.0 while the sale lasts this game actually looks pretty incredible even on low settings which is what we're looking at here this is the RX 6600 and we are on 1080p native resolution low settings now this town area of the game looks great but the forest area I think is actually a little bit more demanding so we'll definitely switch over there but I kind of like to start here just kind of show off like how good this town can look on the low preset and I I will uh go ahead and double check the settings for you guys so basically we're on 1080p 1080p native resolution and um at this point I've basically just clicked the lowquality preset and left everything at its just default values from there now keep in mind that the uh the system acquirements list for this game says that the RX 6600 which we're testing here which by the way only costs around $200 uh is good for 1080p low settings with upscaling at the Quality setting and currently we're not using that um and good for only 30 frames per second but here we're seeing that we're at almost 60 frames per second however um I do want to mention again like I said that I think the forested area of the game I think just with all of the foliage density the Shadows things like that I think we'll see a bit uh lower performance in this area but again even at low settings it does look quite good and and I think that's really the challenging part of this game is that the the low preset I think is pretty much what the like PlayStation 5 is running at um I'm I don't have 100% confirmation on that but I think fairly close so you just really can't scale down to graphic settings that actually look bad but perform well if that makes sense it's always going to look fairly good now here uh even in the forested area while our performance is significantly lower um do we're around 40 it is playable now I'm getting some stutters on my frame time graph do not that this is my first time running through this area so it is possible that there could be some Shader compilation issues happening there uh so I'm actually going to run down this pathway a second time and I'm curious if we will still uh see little frame time spikes seems a bit smoother H still a little bit of spikes so interesting I don't like those frame time spikes like I said I don't know if there will be an optimized driver released for this game tomorrow when it launches um like I said I currently don't have one but the overall performance does seem to be around 40 frames per second now um and that's already running at Native resolution and again yes low settings but they do look pretty good now the system requirements list was uh say saying that we should be using quality upscaling even at 1080p now I'll be honest in most games I'm not in love with the uh FSR upscaling at 1080p resolution I think we tend to look a bit pixelated and from what I've seen of the console version of the game so far in videos like digital foundaries my main complaint is the uh the unstable image quality in the uh in the upscaling that's involved but anyway uh it does look like even here running down this thick forested area lots of foliage lots of Shadows all of that uh other than the spiky frame time graph which again I don't like the actual performance is in the mid-50s and on a variable refresh rate display I think this is going to look uh pretty good my uh Mouse movement feels a little bit choppy which I noticed in my La last video as well uh a comment said that that's a common thing with this engine uh the controller camera panning felt a little bit better and especially if you're playing on a controller and the slow paste gameplay here um I think frame rates like these are actually pretty much fine in fact I'd be curious if we could push uh graphic settings even higher and actually go back to Native resolution in other words again what if we were looking at more like a uh you know I want to be over 30 frames per second but maybe I don't care too much about um High uh High refresh rate so looks like at medium settings native 1080p were a little over 30 in this scene however do keep in mind again that um we uh uh we don't know if this is the most demanding area of the game you know like I think it's pretty demanding it's certainly a lot more demanding than the town section I showed you uh but I'm certain that there's going to be you know some kind of you know more demanding area in the game the foliage looks uh a little bit sparkly to me I think with interesting uh let me go ahead and kick on a bit of upscaling at those settings um so 720p internal resolution so that's FSR 2 quality we're hitting 40ish FPS and again this is at the medium preset but again even the low low preset looks quite good but I will say that um if I'm playing a slow paced game 40 FPS can sometimes feel okay to me where 30 FPS is still uh a little lower than than I'd like to manage anyway that's what we're seeing here uh performance-wise I mean maybe just for fun let's go ahead and kick on uh if we are going to upscale what if we just went all the way up to the high quality preset so this is 1080p upscaled from 720p FSR 2 quality uh at the high preset in the game again lots of foliage lots of Shadows and uh completely playable and again this is just a 200 $100 graphics card at this point in time so uh anyway let's go ahead and check out the other ones on the system requirements list I think the next up is the 6600 XT version all right I popped in the RX 6600 XT version and currently we're at 1080p medium settings uh we'll try some other stuff out as well now let me run around here while I talk a bit about it and start the Benchmark counter uh so the system requirements list show this as the medium recommended AMD GPU but they show that for 1440p medium 30fps with FSR 2 on the balanced upscaling preset um which is not exactly what I'm testing here so this is 1080p native medium settings and it looks like we're you know holding kind of in the upper 30s around 40 kind of depends on which way we're looking that kind of a thing so um still seeing a bit of the same kind of stutters on the frame time graph that I noticed on the um uh on the uh non-xt version of this card but let's go ahead and go to the uh actual system requirements listed uh settings which was 1440p output and you know what before we kick on the upscaling let's just try it out natively so this is 1440p medium native resolution looks like we're down into the 20s so we're certainly not going to be comfortable here without upscaling so let's go ahead and kick that upscaling back on so right here we're almost 30 frames per second looking that direction which seemed to be easier than looking the other way that had more dense foliage and shadows but anyway uh let's go ahead and go to the recommended preset which was 1440p balanced upscaling medium preset and reset my frame rate counters and away we go so heading this way which uh seem to be the less demanding direction to look uh we're kind of in the 40s let's take a look down this way which seem to be a bit more demanding upper 30s still pretty close to 40 um and again the system requirements list called this 30fps and again system requirements lists generally uh aren't giving you an exact average it's more like if it's well below 60 they'll call it 30 if it's usually above 30 um so yeah seems like that is pretty much hitting that and again this does seem pretty playable at these settings especially if you were on a controller and especially this kind of slow paste of a game however I do want to take a look at some other things one is what about the low preset um the main thing I notic about the low preset is it does look good uh the shadow quality is the one thing that really does kind of get me it stands out as a little bit more flickery and distracting uh so this is the low preset but still with the uh balanced upscaling I was just curious if it might make might smooth things out quite a bit um by going down to these settings do do see a little bit of shimmering on the foliage things like that um which is probably for the most part in FSR 2 upscaling uh artifact but anyway yeah performance seems totally playable there even if we're not locking 60 frames per second or anything like that let's go ahead and look at the Quality upscaling if we're at the uh low preset 1440p looks like that kind of puts us into the 40s running down this pathway and what if we went ahead and looked at the native resolution so this is 1440p native resolution low settings looks like we're bouncing around 30 and I would imagine there's not a lot of headro here for uh more demanding scenes so looking like native 1440p is not going to be a good experience here and uh let's go ahead and take a look at Native 1080p resolution though so let's go go native 1080p low settings uh that's what we're at now so 1080p low it is not looking like it's going to be a 60fps experience but it's in the mid-40s even like I said in this heavily shadowed and foliaged uh area of the forest here and again in a game like this especially if you were playing on a controller and uh you know it's pretty slow paced gameplay from the parts of the game I have played uh I think this is totally playable now the question becomes can we get 60 frames per second in this scene if we do stay to the low preset and enable upscaling so first let's try quality upscaling FSR does struggle at 1080p uh especially um tends to have a lot of um fizziness on the edges of characters and objects in motion things like that but it does look like if you are looking for a 60 frames per second experience uh we are pretty close here we're not holding over it at all times and like I said I'm sure there will be areas of the game that are even more demanding than this but looks like if we do FSR 2 quality low settings and the game still does look uh perfectly reasonable um there we go let's go ahead and try out the next GPU recommended which was the 6700 XT all right we've now fired up the RX 6700 XT and we can see here we're at 1080p native resolution at the medium preset and this is the recommended GPU on the system requirements for medium settings at 1080p uh but with performance mode upscaling in order to hit the 60fps target well we're certainly at Native 1080P and not hitting a 60fps lock uh we are still seeing some of those frame time stutters so if the Assumption was maybe it was was a vram issue on the 8 GB cards well we're now on a 12 GB card uh vram usage is reporting below eight and I'm still seeing some stutters although I'm going to run back here again uh to see if it's smoothed out on the second pass it actually does look a bit smoother here um interesting so I wonder if any of those stutters were related to vram that's just a question mark I certainly have Absolut no proof of that and I still get a bit of a stutter when I when I turn the camera uh quickly there it seems like but uh anyway let's go ahead and test out what they actually recommended in the preset uh sorry in the system requirements which was going all the way down to Performance mode upscaling uh which seems a little extreme and they they did the same thing to the 6700 XD try not 67 sorry the RTX 3070 and it also seemed a bit extreme on that one as well now it does look like this is actually getting us to around 60 frames per second so um actually seems fairly accurate although I guess I would say I'm surprised that okay here now we're now we're way over 60 let me turn the other way again did it just take a minute to kick in or something no we're down to about 60 here so what I'm what I'm seeing here is that um interestingly it does seem necessary to do this if I want to keep a above 60 when looking in the more demanding Direction uh however when I'm you know just looking this way uh this the same settings get us up over 80 so pretty interesting how big of a difference that can make uh so it seems like maybe their system requirements were trying to really say like Well if you really don't want to be dipping below 60 this is what you've got to do um but again when I just go back to the native resolution okay this direction is 48 frames per second so we're just not gaining a massive amount in this particular scene from that now not every graphic setting or Shader you know like scales with resolution so it is possible that some of what's uh taking up that demand just isn't something scaling with resolution it certainly looks like at Native 1080p medium we can be uh very very playable here but yeah it does look like locking that 60fps is very difficult um so the other thing we could look at is what if we went down to the low settings which again I've shown do look quite good here my my biggest complaint is the um resolution on the shadows in certain scenes looking a bit flickery so going down to low settings 1080p on the 6700 XD looks like we're kind of in the mid 50s um more stutters on the frame time graph on the low preset that's interesting maybe it's uh these new shaders building since we've adjust adjusted settings let me turn the corner again and see if it's a bit smoother the second time through uh does look a bit smoother the second time through although not totally smooth but overall frame rates are close to 60 frames per second I'm curious if we did then kick on a little bit of uh FSR at the Quality setting if that would go ahead and um boost us uh to higher frame rates again though I I don't think this style of game really necessitates a uh High frame rate now here we are able to stay over 60 FPS going down this pathway where that was a lot more difficult at the medium preset so it certainly looks like going down to um medium uh sorry going down to low from medium did make that area a bit less demanding uh let's go ahead and look at this at 1440p though because I think I I think a lot of people with a 6700 XT uh have it as a uh you know 1440 40p GPU in mind and we'll go back to the native settings so we're now at 1440p low settings looks like we're in the 40s going this way and turning back around we are dipping into the 30s the kind of upper 30s that's with no upscaling we can go ahead and kick on uh not probably not go all the way down to balance let's try quality so let's try FSR quality at 1440p output resolution low preset which again in this game does still look quite good looks like we're 60s is let's go ahead and turn this way which seemed to be the more demanding thing yeah definitely not over 60 here but we're close to it no major issues if you're on a variable refresh rate display something like that all right guys uh I think that uh wraps it up for the 6700 XT let's go ahead and take a look at the 7800 XT which was the next recommended GPU all right we're on the RX 7800 XT and uh currently we're at 1440p Native resolution and the high preset and I'll run around while I talk about that a little bit so um um the system requirements list actually are listing this GPU as the uh recommended GPU for high settings at um 4K resolution but using an internal resolution of 1080p meaning FSR 2 at the performance setting and that's not what I'm testing here we're testing 1440p native but I will certainly will test that and it's looking like uh we're not quite locked walking to 60 frames per second at a native 1440p and looking down this more difficult Corridor we're definitely down in the upper 40s uh now one option would surely be surely be to turn off the high settings but before we do that let's also play around with the resolution scaling so if I go down to Quality upscaling I'm curious where that gets us here so we're at FSR 2 quality at 1440p output High preset in the game and actually now this difficult shadowed um path through the forest that has given us trouble on some other gpus certainly does seem to be actually handling pretty well so it's looking like the 7800 XD can run this game at the high preset FSR 2 quality uh with pretty good results looks like you'll be mostly over 60 FPS again I can't guarantee if you know some other scenes in the game are are maybe going to be more demanding than that but let's go ahead and test out what this was actually recommended for now I'm not sure everybody buys a 7800 XD as a 4K GPU I think it's more likely to be used as a 1440p GPU uh but let's go down to the performance mode upscaling 1080p internal rendering resolution High preset this is what the systems requirements list uh was talking about and it's not looking like a 60fps experience it looks like we're 60 going this way but we were um in the 50 is looking down that more difficult uh that more difficult pathway now that's actually similar to what I saw on the 4070 which is the Nvidia version um for the same recommendation from the system requirements I believe we were also dipping into the 50s down this pathway I can't remember the exact number uh but similar results there but again I really think that 1440p is much more likely to be the um uh the target for the uh this particular GPU but actually um you know we might not need to stay at the high preset but you know what I was about to change off that before we do why don't we actually check out 1080p resolution some people do buy a a powerful GPU for a 1080p screen to hit higher refresh rates especially in competitive games and then you still play your single player stuff too uh so are we finally finding a GPU that is going to be running 1080p High preset over 60fps it certainly does seem to be the case again going this direction we're actually over 80 and flipping back to the more demanding uh direction right here we are still in the upper 60s so yeah looks like this game can run the game at the maximum non-r Trace settings 1080p native resolution uh going back to 1440p resolution or actually you know what since we're at 1080p uh this is also the recommended GPU or actually it's the 6800 XD which is fair Fairly similar performance- wise in many games I don't know about this one uh but rather than popping the 6800 XT this is also the low preset for Ray tracing recommended GPU albeit only for 30 frames per second um in the systems requirements list so let's try out 1080p low Ray tracing and without upscaling it certainly looks like we are below 30 frames per second so yeah I'm going to pretty much say that's uh probably not going to be worth it there we could try upscaling but I just don't think kicking on FSR upscaling uh just to get a little bit of the ray tracing here makes a lot of sense so uh instead I want to go back to 1440p resolution with Ray tracing off and play around with if I wanted higher frame rates um what if we tried like the medium preset rather than the high preset so we'll go to 1440p medium so kicking down to medium native 1440p and I like the medium preset low looks pretty good but again these Shadows seem to be a lot better um resolution when you when you increase the presets obviously I could go custom settings but for the purposes of this video I'm not really looking for optimized settings so much as just kind of playing around and seeing what we can get kind of in the 50s there um so it's not 60fps at the medium preset what if we went to Quality upscaling which is usually pretty acceptable at 1440p so looks like this difficult uh path way here 1440p medium settings with FSR 2 quality upscaling seems like a pretty good experience here again this easier direction we uh well up into the 80 frames per second range and going back down this more difficult pathway kind of upper 60s all right now this is the uh highest GPU on the system requirements list but I think I have time to throw in a 7900 XTX and just see what the highest uh performing AMD GPU is capable of all right all right we're now on amd's 7900 XTX they top-of-the-line GPU I have the AMD uh I was going to say Founders Edition reference model anyway uh we're at 1440p Native resolution and I am at the high preset uh with none of the ray tracing turned on let's go ahead and see if we can actually play the game native 1440p on this monster of a GPU it's looking like we're doing pretty well so far we are uh yeah in the upper 70s let's see how we do as we round this corner down this shadowed pathway uh that's given us a lot of trouble on other gpus and it's looking like this one can stay over 70 frames per second most of the time down that difficult hallway so I think this bodess pretty well for if you do want to max out this game uh non Ray tracing but Max rasterized settings which look quite good no upscaling 1440p the 7900 xdx can get the job done and while this isn't exactly super high frame rates um I think for this style of game it's it's certainly plenty and there's there's absolutely no need uh to turn things down from here however if you did kick on quality upscaling let's go ahead and see what that does for us looks like we may now be uh around 100 frames per second going down this difficult uh Forest pathway um and of course you could also turn down settings and all of that uh but I'm interested in using this as a 4K GPU I think the 7900 XTX would often be purchased for 4K resolution uh as well as 1440p I think both makes sense so let's go ahead and go up to 4K resolution let's start out at the native 4K resolution where even the RTX 490 uh wasn't exactly hitting High frame rate targets uh even without the rate tracing enabled let's go ahead and see how we do so 4K resolution High settings looks like we're going to be around 40 frames per second going down this difficult pathway but again that is a native 4K resolution at the high preset so we are asking quite a bit and like I said this game isn't exactly bad at 40 FPS um for the style of game it is although definitely I think somebody on a 7900 xdx would probably be shooting for more uh so the options are now to upscale and or turn down graphic settings so that's what we're going to do we're going to start with the upscaling at 4K resolution upscaling usually still looks pretty good at the Quality setting even using FSR since we have a lot of still have a lot of pixels you still have 1440p uh resolution internally and then upscale it from there to look even better and it is looking like that's going to be enough to hit uh 60fps going down our dark and difficult Forest pathway I am C curious if we'd be able to do any Ray tracing on the 7900 XTX however I don't think Ray tracing at 4K resolution is probably going to be the thing to do so we are instead probably going to be like okay if you bought this card for a 1440p graphics card um could you get by with any Ray tracing at all I'll go ahead and leave on the quality upscaling cuz we are using Ray tracing I'll leave the base line settings at the high preset and now we're going to kick the ray tracing preset onto low um that kicks on a variety of Ray Trace settings it gets us Ray traced direct lighting as well as uh path traced IND sorry sorry turn keeps off the path tracing but it does get us transparency Reflections at low I don't think this forest scene is going to have a lot of that uh and again this is the quality upscaling already so we're in the 40s I mean this is certainly playable you're gaining something from the ray tracing but you're also losing something from the upscaling and loss of frame rate so I'm not sure this is going to be the recommended experience here but it is certainly a thing now just for fun we're going to go to the performance mode upscaling first just see what it does to these Ray tracing settings performance but then we're going to just see if the path tracing setting works at all so performance mode upscaling at 1440p not really something I like to do with FSR and it's still not hitting a full locked 60 FPS here looks like we're still dropping into the 50s so not great probably not how I'd play the game but just for fun I want to see what happens when we kick on path tracing so let's go to the ray tracing medium preset uh this is going to turn on uh it's going to bring up the denoising quality it's going to leave on the direct lighting we're going to get path traced indirect lighting at medium now and path TR traced indirect lighting D noising quality at medium transparency Reflections go up to high honestly I'm not sure the forest is the best place to really show this off but it is more demanding than the city is um so well the city I think you know you can show off the puddles and things like that at least uh this is the more heavy duty performance it is actually looking like we're getting a 30fps experience but again this is requiring performance upscaling in order to do that and I don't think the image quality tradeoff is worth it um FSR 2 performance is leaving a lot to be desired on the um image quality especially in like you know the tree branches things like that I think there's a lot of breakup around the edges General softness to the image um but honestly uh getting 30 FPS is actually more than I expected from a path tracing mode so let's go ahead and kick on to the high Ray tracing preset so this brings the uh path traced indirect lighting up to high uh so let's go ahead and see what happens now we can't use Ray reconstruction which the Nvidia gpus uh are able to do which both boosts performance as well as the uh image quality uh in my testing and it does look like we're able to hit 30 FPS um so interesting I think it was fun to test out but I think these are definitely not the settings you would realistically want to use to play the game all right I think that's it for this video uh hopefully you guys found it useful and or interesting again I'll be interested in seeing whether or not uh we get a a day one driver or anything like that is there any interest in seeing Intel Arc gpus I think they already do have their driver out for this uh for this game so maybe I could take a look at the Intel Arc gpus if you think that would be something you'd like to see let me know in the comment section and I hope all of you have an excellent day

Channel: Daniel Owen

Views: 83,333

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Id: C-pDiAuw0zc

Length: 32min 1sec (1921 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023