Did Alan Wake II Make a Mistake?? … and how I fixed it

because of how demanding this new game is it actually prompted digital Foundry so a very prominent Tech YouTube channel it made them do this 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 they changed the video that they're going to make into is it really that demanding and that brings up a lot of questions because so many YouTubers or content creators for example one of the most prominent ones that's been talking about this is Daniel Owen he has made multiple videos about the system requirements and even testing it in certain cases and you can see by the views on these videos they're getting a quite a bit of steam however though it puts us in a tough spot because it's very demanding but generally speaking it looks really good so does that justify the system requirements that the game is asking for and when I asked you guys if your system could actually Run the game this is the response that I got so it seems like a decent chunk of people can play it the thing is like with graphically demanding games not everybody is always going to be able to play it there nice keep it right there no more votes please as well as they're forcing you to use mesh shaders put in a graphics card that's older than an NVIDIA GTX 10 series or an an AMD RX 5000 series then you can't support the mesh shaders and you get this error when you start the game then when you hop into the game it really destroys the performance but it really begs the question is Allen wake 2 a trend Setter game and this is the future that we should be working towards whoa the M Place character model looks really good or is this something that we really should scrap and just get rid of entirely so in order to figure this out I tested a bunch of graphics cards let's go I did these tests by walking through the woods here because the woods is the most graphically demanding part of the game that I have found so far now first we're going to start with the RX 5700 XT and this card doesn't support mesh shaders but you do see here this has enough horsepower behind it they are able to get it to at least 30 FPS at 1080p low with FSR performance I'm not saying that's good but it is at least playable now here is the minimum specs graphics card the RX 6600 you can see across the board not that bad of performance remedy was saying this was only going to be getting 30 FPS at 1080p low with upscaling but you can see that they compl completely underestimated that and at Native settings we're getting over 30 close to 40 FPS and if you turn on a little upscaling it you get a 40% boost and gets you up to the 50s in the FPS and if you go to FSR performance which I wouldn't recommend doing it 1080p but it is getting used 60% faster with that card and you can also see that we only lose 23% by turning on high settings so the scaling isn't that dramatic between them and they also don't look that different so we can get close to a 30 FPS experience a 1080p High Instead This graphics card is very interesting the RX 6700 because this one is very similar to the card that's in the PS5 and Xbox series X consoles you can see at 1080p low we're getting over a 50fps experience here pretty darn playable as well as you can turn on some upscaling if you want a 1080P and get a better experience but if you jump to the high settings you can also get a pretty good experience across the board get a 60fps experience using FSR quality at 1080p High not that bad you can also jump up to 1440p low which is very similar to what these consoles are actually playing at but I'm not sure if my numbers a little bit off here we're getting a giant boost the performance with FSR quality on here now with the ark a580 this is a $180 graphics card you can see that your eyes are probably burning right now the game didn't actually look like this it's just how it came out in the recording for some reason but you can see at 1080p low we are able to get over 30 FPS if we use a little bit of upscaling we get a above that and I would say the faster Arc a750 is just a better experience if you turn on FSR quality you can get close to a 50fps experience sometimes around 40 mid-40s but it's not all that bad jumping up to a $500 graphics card like the RX 7800 XT I'm just starting this off with 1440p cuz this is what you'd probably expect to be playing at on 1440p low we're getting over 60fps with this card but turning on a little FSR quality which is completely fine especially in this game that we're going to talk about the upscaling quality a little bit later and the graphical quality of this game you can get over 60 FPS and actually close to 90 a lot of the time now if you turn on the high settings you can see at Native we're getting under 60 but turning on FSR quality again if you want to play high settings then you can get a nice playable experience here as well if we want to turn on R tracing now I would not recommend turning on R tracing especially on an AMD card at Native we drop all the way down to 20 FPS and honestly at least in the woods here it's not worth the visual difference in the perform performance hit in this case moving on to the RTX 380 you can find these things for about $400 right now on the used Market what I've noticed is usually the 7800 XT is faster than the 380 but this game seems to be Nvidia favored the 380 is coming out ahead of the 7800 XT a lot of the time at 1440p low we can see that we're getting well over 60 FPS very smooth very playable experience turn on dealss quality which looks great at 1440p and it's just even better if you want to play high settings this is dlaa by the way at Native you're not going to be getting a 60 FPS experience on the 3080 but you could just turn on dlss quality and get over 60 FPS while playing at high settings I don't think that's a bad compromise here if you just turn on rate tracing low though we get a very Major Performance hit under 30 FPS at Native dlss quality is getting it up to the 40s and that's not that bad dlss performance these seem to scale like crazy using upscaling here getting close to 60fps with high setting with rt low on being completely honest here the performance was not that bad and Allen wake 2 is a very demanding game but I was surprised when the minimum specs GPU performed as well as it did an argument could be said that we were running at low settings a lot of the times to achieve this performance but honestly the low settings still looked great in this game like check out the first impressions that we had on stream now I went to low settings holy crap the game barely even looks different am I crazy this means that the average person who isn't screenshotting and zooming in on all of the graphical settings or doing side by sides by themselves is probably not going to notice the difference between low and high settings most of the time and that's why honestly my recommended settings for Allen wake 2 is just to run the game at low because you get some more performance and you probably won't notice the difference between turning it to high however though if you want want to improve some of the issues that the graphics do have like the shadows and the reflections if you have an Nvidia graphics card that's at least an RTX 3080 or faster then you can turn on R tracing low and this does greatly improve the shadows and the Reflections in the game especially if you use Ray reconstruction the traditional denoisers look very grainy whereas you use nvidia's Ray reconstruction with dlss 3.5 and it clean up all that it is absolutely gorgeous not to mention that Ray reconstruction is able to save you a lot of performance with Ray tracing because the traditional denoisers in this game are extremely demanding and they don't even look that good so turning on Ray reconstruction and only putting on the RT low preset means that you can save a lot on performance and the game actually looks better Ray reconstruction is a great technical Showcase in this game even if not everybody's going to be able to use ra R tracing in it then there is the whole other conversation with this well if low settings and high settings look similar and they don't offer that much of a performance difference between them then most of the scaling graphic and performance scaling in this game has to be done with upscaling and that is true as you saw across the board with a lot of the graphics cards ATT tested here yes upscaling was the major driving force between the performance here but this is a whole debate that I'm going to go into in a completely separate video because a game like this that is that graphically demanding upscaling does at least provide a way to maintain or preserve the look of the game itself while giving you more performance yes the image might be a little bit blurrier yes there might be artifacts with the upscaling but at the very least it's nothing like having to turn off Shadows or Reflections or Global Illumination in the game that completely change the visual presentation that the devs were going for and in this case remedy the makers of Allen wake 2 I think are a very competent set of developers that know how to optimize their game and in a case like this if the game and the visuals that it's trying to achieve are just that demanding then upscaling is a great way to maintain the visual presentation of the game while giving you more performance and it's also very fast for the developers to implement which saves them Time When developing the game but in this case with alen wake 2 I think is completely fine especially because the upscaling quality within this game is really good with FSR and [Music] dlss Allen wake 2 is a crazy technical Masterpiece from what I have experience so far the realism of the graphics when within this game go to achieve levels of immersion and show the art direction of this eerie and uneasy atmosphere to its fullest extent there's somebody chainsawing in the the background that's not in real life that's in the game that sounds so realistic it's crazy however it does suck if this means that not as many people are going to be able to experience Allen wake 2 especially because it's only $50 for a triple A game in 2023 that blew me away that's kind of unheard of right now this game definitely justifies its graphically demand in nature and I honestly think that it's pushing gaming forward by intertwining these crazy graphical features and also going to achieve a greater vision for the game itself this is very exciting for gaming and I'm I'm excited to see where it's going to go into the future that's about it for me and I just want to say thank you for watching this video want to hear your thoughts in the the comments below hopefully you have a good one and peace oh

Channel: Vex

Views: 56,289

Keywords: alan wake 2, alan wake, alan wake II, system requirements, graphics, alan wake 2 gameplay

Id: zqBKKYaCyjI

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023