Alan Wake 2 - PlayStation 5 DF Tech Review - Remedy Raises The Bar Yet Again

remedy entertainment has a very strong graphical record from the physics driven Mayhem of Max pain 2 to the rrac brutalism of control and of course the volumetric heavy Wilderness of alen wake each remedy effort has pushed visual boundaries on its host Hardware Allen wake 2 is no exception this is a topf flight technical treat that pushes modern systems hard with often extraordinary results so today we'll be AAL Val ating the game on PS5 to see how those Advanced visuals fa across a variety of scenarios and we'll be taking a more in-depth look at how the console formats and modes compare in a subsequent video so how do visual features image quality and performance Fair on Sony's current gen machine and how does the console code compare to the maxed out path Trace Splendor of the PC release Allen awake 2 is an absolutely stunning game on both consoles and PC and is up there with the absolute best in the business in real-time rendering it's an extremely impressive Technical and artistic achievement and it's a brilliant showcase for remedies inhouse North light game engine a lot of that comes down to the game's very high quality indirect lighting every environment has an excellent presentation of global illumination with light bouncing convincingly through constrained hallways and Forest outdoor areas alike the consistency of the lighting is really what stands out here I had a very hard time spotting any problems even in typical problem areas for games like these characters also blend seamlessly with the lighting presentation and never seem to stick out or look awkward it looks like we're getting some kind of biged GI here alongside screen space ambient occlusion to deal with indirect lighting and the combination produces excellent results if you do look closely you can can spot some minor artifacts in the baked Lighting in the environment but in typical play the results hold up very well this holds true in heavily overcast conditions filling out low contrast scenes with subtle depth it's also the case in these naturally lit Interiors with light from the sun beautifully Illuminating constrained spaces and these Moody artificially lit nighttime scenes also look fantastic volumetrics are used heavily throughout the game like prior remedy efforts which gives lighting a thick heavy look that accentuates Alan awake 2's dark mood materials are accurately differentiated too with a wide range of lighting responses the diffuse Fabrics of Allen's coat here look perfectly accurate as we walk underneath these soft lights the glossy floor and soft leather seats in the diner create a beautiful contrast in this scene and every flavor of wood and pasty flesh in the nursing home looks perfectly true to life at times it looks more like a CG movie than a video game because the materials sit perfectly within each environment and just look very natural Allen awake 2 is absolutely packed with geometric detail as well Assets in the game are universally High poly and look good even at extreme close range Poppin is kept to a minimum although environments do tend to be a bit on the smaller side and remedy loves to throw around all kinds of tritis throughout the game empty beer bottles spare coolers and other remnants of Despair and disuse foliage outo is topnotch as well with Incredible density and of course a convincing reaction to the player flashlight and to changing environmental conditions the super high quality of the rendering makes a lot of remedy's creative choices land in a way that they wouldn't with more conservative technology the game has some very inventive environments in addition to areas that feel more familiar some of the sequences in Allen wake 2 would come across as awkward with less sophisticated rendering the high quality of the character models helps a lot there too facial detail is exquisite and skin shading looks accurate and correct across a wide range of lighting conditions hair seems to be card-based but looks appropriately complex and animates reasonably well a few cut scene moments do seem a bit uncanny though and facial animation doesn't always match the Fidelity of the facial rendering perhaps the use of separate character face models and voice actors throws up some production hurdles here though mostly the results look perfectly fine I'd say of course that isn't as much of an issue for the game's liveaction cutcenes of which there are quite a few these seem to emphasize Alan wake's more surreal elements and are often used in some of the bizarre interludes that convey much of the Game's plot video quality is fine though the heavy film grain does create some macro blocking and the encodes appear to be 1080p 30 FPS is the frame rate here which presents without frame pacing issues though 24 FPS would have lended these sequences a bit more cinematic flare at the cost of uneven frame persistence at 60 HZ output so those are the areas where alen awake 2 excels but are there any areas where the game falls short Shadows mostly look good on consoles but they do stick out a bit at times Sun Shadows have a beautifully filtered appearance with nice bouquet shapes which looks very pleasing but do have a perceptibly low res resolution Shadow Cascades also tend to be quite aggressive with the highest resolution Shadow map only coming into view a meter or two from the player flashlight Shadows are also perfectly good but similarly suffer from low resolution at a distance these are sensible compromises and the filtering keeps the Shadows coherent enough most of the time but these concessions are worth noting Reflections are a bit of a mixed bag on consoles Allen wake 2 primarily relies on screen space reflections the game lacks the hardware RT Reflections that we saw in control on consoles as well as the remedy developed single player component of Crossfire X these present the usual issues with SSR namely problems with occlusion especially for surfaces parallel to the player Camera Plus sometimes the SSR takes on a bit of a grainy appearance like on the water surface here SDF Reflections seem to be used as a fallback again like recent RAR titles which is a kind of software rate tracing just like Unreal Engine 5 software Lumin Reflections these don't do a great job of maintaining reflection detail though when the information needed for SSR isn't on screen but that brings us to the PC release and its path traced Glory when I started tackling the PS5 code more than anything else I wanted to know just how much console players were missing out by playing Allen wake 2 without the game's key rracing features the answer is quite a bit but still less than I expected I'm playing the game game here on PC with all settings maxed out at 4K including path tracing with dlss 3.5 Ray reconstruction and its performance mode but with frame generation turned off the reflections and shadows are obviously cleaned up enormously with path traced lighting turned on we see pin sharp mirror Reflections across calm bodies of water and mirrors with much greater detail than the PS5 code and a clean grainfree resolve this seclusion issues on PS5 prove no problem all for PC here transparent surfaces are also path traced like the window of this Cafe detail that we only had a faint impression of before like the reflection of light in this old CRT and the light spilling out from this reflected doorway looks perfectly clear the material properties of glossy and semi gloss materials seem a lot more consistent as a result Shadows now exhibit realistic fall off and variable penumbra as they grow more distant from the casting object object Shadows up close are pin sharp while Shadows further from the source become light and faint Alias Shadow maps are a thing of the past year with a super consistent and realistic RT Shadow presentation throughout this close-up shot showcases the differences best I think on PS5 we see an alias uniformly soft shadow that looks fine but is very video gamey while PC gets beautiful Ray traced Shadows with sharp and fine detail on the character's Shadow and varing degrees of sharpness for the vegetation softening as it grows more distant from the wall also notice that the foliage animation is retained in the raate tracing which is something that we don't always see in games with rt Shadows interestingly though the actual quality of the indirect lighting isn't a world apart on the PC version with path tracing now there are all kinds of little details that are improved for instance the grass doesn't have the uniformly thick AO coverage that we see on PS5 in instead showing heavy occlusion only in dense patches of grass or underneath this table which is darkened appropriately now some later areas in particular artificially lit scenes with many light sources might showcase more noticeable differences too but most of the time the overall appearance of the indirect lighting is very similar Alex will have more on the game's path tracing in subsequent videos but my personal impression is that console players aren't missing out on an enormous amount by sticking with their PS5 machines I was worried that we'd be seeing a repeat of the cyberpunk 2077 situation where PC players get an incredible path Trace experience that the consoles come nowhere near replicating but that's not the case here in Alan oake 2 the PS5 presentation looks awesome it's just that the path trce experience cleans up flaws that do exist in the ps5s lighting an image quality is superior of course as you might expect with the dlss driven image on PC the the path TRC PC version does look a lot better but it doesn't embarrass the consoles which is an important distinction let's close things out by taking a quick look at how the two modes on PS5 stack up this is just a quick overview as we'll be taking a more in-depth look at the mode variations in a follow-up video covering all console formats essentially PS5 has two modes quality and performance the key differentiator here is resolution as you might expect the quality mode uses FSR 2 to hit a 2160p output with an internal resolution of 1270p performance mode again uses FSR 2 but this time with an output of 1440p and an internal resolution of 847posts with similar output resolutions though perhaps only going to the lower contrast artwork and heavy postprocessing Beyond resolution the most obvious cutback in the performance mode is full age density which is considerably lower than the quality mode unfortunately image quality can be slightly questionable in Allen wake 2 on PS5 there's quite a bit of image breakup on fine details which is noticeable in both visual modes it's mostly acceptable enough and I think the overall rendering quality more than justifies the sometimes spotty up samp but it can annoy I found the aling a bit more distracting in the game's artificial areas than in the naturalistic outdoor settings in the quality mode Allen wake 2 targets 30 FPS and generally hits that Target most gameplay runs perfectly well and hugs the 30fps line here with no frame pasing issues whatsoever but there are certain specific areas like the second Saga Anderson mission that run poorly with constant sub3 FPS performance again that's no big issue in most of the areas you come across but some environments seem to cause frame rates to buckle the performance mode targets 60 and actually does a pretty good job hitting that figure most gameplay especially indoors runs just fine at 60 FPS but outdoor areas particularly the spots that caused us some trouble in the quality mode often run below 60 FPS it's a pretty decent turnout considering the visual quality on display here but I would like a more consistent 60 if at all possible I also noticed some glitches while playing I got stuck on the geometry here and was unable to escape without reloading my save this trolley didn't seem to have any Collision for me and I was able to clip through it without issue this bizarre Black Mass appeared in an apartment Lobby which seemed like an effect gone arai and there were a couple of occasions where prompt to ask someone a question wouldn't appear forcing a Reload I expect that these issues will be sorted out in time and it's possible that some may have been addressed in the day one patch but they are worth noting beyond the technical minutia alen wake 2 is a very good game though it's very different from 2010's Allen wake original or its DLC expansions and American Nightmare pseudo sequel this is firmly in survival horror territory with limited combat and a high LEL of difficulty the flashlight mechanics are largely preserved from the first game but puzzles and exploration Play A much larger role and the game ultimately doesn't feel very much like the earlier titles and there's a real emphasis on the horror I found myself quite Disturbed at times with some viscerally intense sequences difficult subject matter and agitation inducing use of Split Second Cuts Alan Wake 2's mind place and writer room mechanics are genuinely quite cool though as separate mental world where you can sort through case details and rewrite scenes on the Fly unlocking new areas it's almost like remedy mashed up Resident Evil with Ace Attorney here and it works surprisingly well the Game's plot is also a bit of a page Turner the way both new and returning players will need a refresher on the prior title stories before starting I particularly enjoyed the references to max pain control and Quantum Brak sprinkled throughout from a visual perspective though Allen awake 2 is a pretty extraordinary effort on current Jen consoles there's not much that can rival the incredible density of detail and fine grained Lighting on display here that's not to say that there aren't issues and performance does need some additional work but it's hard to say that Allen wake 2 is anything other than a superb looking title for players who like survival horror and want to experience some of the best technology deployed so far this generation it's an easy recommendation if you enjoyed this video please like subscribe and press the bell for YouTube notifications check out the patreon at digital fund.net for exclusive and Early Access content and to get in touch use social media thanks for watching

Channel: Digital Foundry

Views: 409,763

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Id: JawxvOF__4Q

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023