Alan Wake 2 PC - Rasterisation Optimised Settings Breakdown - Is It Really THAT Demanding?

Allen wake 2 is the best looking game released so far this generation whether you play the game on a console or on a PC maxed with path tracing this game will tend to melt your eyeballs between its animation lighting and asset quality this game has it all so in today's video for DF hello what do you mean the internet freaked out do I have [Music] to well instead of talking about Ray tracing recommended settings path tracing or anything like that in today's video I'm going to be talking about [Music] this what is this this is a set of system recommendations produced by remedy for Allen wake 2 honestly I find it completely innocuous but apparently it is controversial on the internet why because of this bit right here I read so many comments and so many exclamations about how bad it is that they are recommending to play the game at 1080p dlss performance mode at medium settings on an RTX 370 and that 1080p dlss performance mode is as we all know 540p internally for me this means absolutely nothing that I should get upset about because I have no idea what medium settings are by looking at this or exactly how the game settings scale and what they do but since people made such a big deal about this I thought I would make a video dedicated to this controversy app release to figure out optimized settings and what is going on exactly let me start with some cold hard facts for one the game runs at 1440p FSR 2 balance mode on PlayStation 5 with a flat resolution and no Dynamic res targeting 60fps me saying that should already be throwing up massive red flags to anyone with common sense about the whole controversy concerning the RTX 3070 how is the PS5 running the game at 1440p FSR 2 balance mode at 60 FPS well we know quite well that an RTX 370 is better in rasterization and far better in rate tracing than a PlayStation 5 that's a good question another cold hard fact is that even at medium settings Allen wake 2 is going to be doing things a lot of last gen games just never did even without Hardware rate tracing or path tracing Allen wake 2 is Thoroughly Beyond nearly every title released so far let me give you some examples an alen wake 2 even with rt off the game is doing raate tracing just in software if you look underneath the screen space Reflections or anywhere in the world it's obvious to see some realtime Reflections there instead of using complete static Cube maps for Reflections like most games from the last generation alen wake 2 uses signed distant fieldof software rate tracing of a lower resolution of the world to get its Reflections this is a lot like the software Lumin Reflections found in Unreal Engine 5 which I think everyone thoroughly considers as a pretty hardcore graphical thing at this point another thing that elwick 2 is even with rt off the game has an extremely robust software Global illumination system where on the highest settings even things like specular Reflections and occlusions of character hair is influenced by the software Global illumination let me tell you doing software GI isn't cheap and the game's Global illumination is one of the reasons why it looks so ridiculously good even without Hardware Ray tracing the last thing to say about allenwick 2's Graphics is that it uses mesh shaders on PC and Xbox series consoles and a similar primitive shaders system on PlayStation 5 mesh shaders are used to fine grain call away geometry that the player cannot see the entire point is to reduce the cost of rendering and allenwick 2 uses those mes Shader savings costs to ridiculously pump up the GE ometry quality of everything you can see in the game if you go anywhere in the world in allenwick 2 you will see just how rounded and decadent the modeling is with scarcely a polygon Edge in sight this is baked into the game's Core Design as a visual feature and as such requires Hardware support for mesh shaders on PC which means older gpus such as the rx5700 or older GTX cards won't be supported by this game let me just put it to you straight this is just how it is new visual quality means new API features this is something PC gaming has had since the dawn of its existence so Allen wake 2 is doing a lot of completely nextg things even without Hardware rate tracing so how exactly is that PS5 at face value running the game at 1440p FSR 2 balance mode with all these nextg features is the PlayStation 5 made of magic I think an examination of its settings in comparison to those found on PC in the settings menu well that'll probably be extremely Illuminating 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 highend 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 this construction workers'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 anistropic 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 all Al 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 the 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 rced Reflections here 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 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 console-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 healthily 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 worst 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 post-processing Quality this is the setting why remedy most likely low balled the 3070 so much like I showed off earlier when this setting is put too low post-processing 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 177% performance lost here and we're getting close to 60 FPS suddenly on the RTX 370 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 just 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 of set on PC FSR 2 and the 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 winds 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 aspect aspects of the visuals you want to clean up and how much performance headro you have based upon your GPU type there are two areas though where I think wins 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 lost 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 RTX 3070 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 Asic 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 now before I close out this video I want to talk about two last things the first one is the settings menu I like it but it could be better in a key area and that is it is powerful for scaling performance but it should offer you a better preview what's going to happen when you change the setting right now the game is still rendering in the background while you change settings and you can see it fizzling on and off there while you do it but it's hard to see what changes are occurring due to the menu overlay being so dark if they just made the menu in this moment fully transparent behind the settings changes you could see what you were doing in real time which is the perfect types of Graphics option menu they should really investigate doing that the last thing I want to mention is the mesh support that was talked about at the beginning of the video the great geometric detail in this game is a key feature as I talked about yet you can still run the game without mesh shaders but with severe performance issues firstly you'll be greeted by this warning when trying to load up the game on an older GPU like a GTX 1080 TI or an rx5700 XT the game performance will be lower than you usually expect now normally the three gpus I have on screen right now have very similar performance they would usually be neck and neck in an older last gen title but with mesh shaders at play for the RT x280 and a less efficient older style vertex shading path for the rx5700 XT and GTX 1080ti well they're scaling a lot worse than the norm walking around the forest in the beginning of the game is one of the heavier areas and we can see the rx5700 XT performing roughly half that of the RTX 2080 and these are usually neck and neck by the way the Pascal based 1080 TI fares even worse running at about 36% of the performance of the RTX 2080s performance and that's intense to see so yes they will perform worse since they lack Hardware support for mes shading curiously the GTX 1080 TI had even worse performance at times like when going into the Mind place where would drop into the teens while the ARX 5700xt performed comparatively better but the point is do not go into this title expecting good or consistent performance if your GPU lacks mesh shaders and that's really it for alen Wake 2 if you turn down the settings to reasonable things like which they do on Console you can get a lot of performance here and the game is not scary to run at all seriously try out these console settings just with higher astrop book filtering for example I'm going to be covering the game still next week by looking at its path tracing and Ray tracing and what performance you can expect there but anyway if you like this video talking about the rasterized performance of this game please hit that like button and subscribe to the channel if you're already a subscriber hit that little bell in the corner to be informed as soon as DF posts a video support us on patreon write a comment below as always this is Alex you

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 260,850

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Id: QrXoDon6fXs

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023