A lot of frustration surfaced earlier this month when Remedy’s Lea-Newin claimed that the game would require DX12 Ultimate and Mesh Shaders. And since Remedy has just lifted the review embargo for Alan Wake 2, we can finally confirm that the game will NOT prevent you from running it on older/unsupported GPUs. In fact, we were able to launch it on an NVIDIA GTX980Ti.
When you first launch the game on older/unsupported GPUs, you’ll get the following warning message. Yes, the game requires Mesh Shaders for optimal performance. Remedy’s Lea-Newin did not lie about it. However, it won’t block you from running it.
So, here’s how the game runs at 1080p/Max Settings/No Ray Tracing on the NVIDIA GTX980Ti. So… yeah… while Alan Wake 2 does launch on this old graphics card, it’s nowhere close to being described as playable. We also got some crashes when we tried to change the resolution.
Not only that but we experienced major visual glitches. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the warning message mentioned them. So, here is a lovely screenshot showcasing these glitches. Man, these artifacts look similar to those you get when a GPU has completely broken down.
What this basically means is that yes, you will be able to run Alan Wake 2 on the NVIDIA 10 series and AMD 5000 series. However, performance won’t be optimal and you may encounter numerous visual glitches.
I should also note that Alan Wake 2 does not use the Denuvo anti-tamper tech. A lot of our readers have been wondering about it. So, rest assured that you won’t have to deal with this anti-tamper tech in this particular title.
Our PC Performance Analysis for Alan Wake 2 will go live this weekend. Until then, you can go ahead and check out our “DLSS 3, Ray Tracing and Path Tracing” benchmarks.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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do you have a 16 series card to test with it? I think they support Mesh Shaders too (but not DX12U).
Daniel Owen on Youtube tested it on a 1070.
You first get a warning that the GPU is not supported.
His GTX 1070 with every option to low, ran the game at 16 fps.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/e04069bee30f8c3cfc4c5581a1798401fcc4e65718c2c05f4cd63dc945d2bd04.jpg
Edit: He’s using render resolution of 1080p, should have scaled down to at least 900p or lower THEN used FSR to upscale so nah this just soft marketing/ad buys imo also has all the effects enabled most people should turn off anyways, 3:17. Screen space, global ill should be off not low. Like always settings matter, just low,high,ultra presets, like he uses there, are worthless unless you have a brute force setup.
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Be nice to get a link but I’ll look it up. Need to see the resolutions used as well, res is pretty important. For instance isn’t 720p when you use FSR2 LOOK like 1080p? and on up, which is now a must for almost everyone. I’m thinking this game will include FSR or will at least be able to be modded into replacing dlss w fsr at some point. Thus Pascal and earlier would be supported with upscaling tech. So setting it to 720p with dlss/fsr on it should render it native even lower than that to get it to LOOK like 720p.
There’s a Portuguese review that mentions testing the game on a laptop with 1660 Ti. It ran at ‘cinematic’ 24 FPS on average at minimum settings and FSR2 Performance. No mention of artifacts, aside from those produced by FSR.
Run it on 1050ti in 4k, hang monitor on wall and you got yourself fancy digital image ram!
So the majority of pc gamers won’t be able to play (with acceptable framerates), will they buy the game ?
7% of PC gamers WILL be able to play Alan Wake 2 at an acceptable framerate. That is over 8.4 million PC gamers.
However not all of them are fans of Alan Wake series.
Play AW1, it’s much better game.
Better pacing, better gameplay, better action sequences, and better plot.
Thank you for your suggestion but I finished AW1 years ago.
So the majority of pc gamers won’t be able to play (with acceptable framerates), will they buy the game ?
I think someone will make a mod to work on dx11 or vulkan right after the game comes out
DX11? With how bad DX11 has MT support and how much lower number of draw calls compared to DX12, I say good luck my friend. Lmao.
Some dumb freaks made AC: Valhalla running on DX11 and the result was a mess.
Vulkan might be good but, but emulating API will have performance hit and who knows what else.
In the end, It’s gonna be usless.
Or the devs themeselves like they did with win7 and QB
i like how all the games i dont care dont have denuvo.
What games you like that have denuvo (or used to have)?
doom 2016, far cry 5, devil may cry 5 and many others why?
Good luck running an older gpu , the vram usage is quite high even on the lowest settings.
If this kind of optimization stops people from playing this woke crap then it’s actually a good thing.
Game should be about alan’s journey. Like the first game. The inclusion of a female character being playable not so coincidentally falls in line with latest trend of chasing feminist bechdel points by sidelining a male character. This is equialvalent to adding female space marine in a space marine game when we know well that’s not possible but the wokes will do so just to flex their control & reach in entertainment. We would have seen a lary croft by now if inclusion and diversity is all that matters equally for everybody. But that’s not the case. This is blatant m!sandry on display. Nothing more.
Here’s gggman’s review where he rightfully explains why the game has alan wake in name only. His involvement in his own game is lesser than mad max in his own 2015 movie
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zHDNVGJA1SM&feature=shared&t=19m38s
First off it’s not poor optimization, it’s using the most cutting edge features. This is something PC gaming has been lacking. We mostly have been getting slightly better console versions. This is a game that utilizes everything a PC can do and I’m pretty happy about it. Not being able to play well on a 980ti is the same as complaining it’s not on PS4.
And seriously? Cause the second character you play is a black women? If that’s all it takes to be “woke” that’s some grade A white supremacy nonsense. Good luck with that.
Let’s change aloy with a male character, let’s replace jesse from control with a male character. Will definitely make you muster all your feministic rage.
I hope they replace Jesse from control. She’s very unattractive and looking at her face pisses me off. All girls use filters on social media to look more attractive. But we’re not allowed to do the same with female characters in games.
“feministic rage”.
I don’t think it means what you think it means.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/90d569a4ccb0884902258e58c264e2ba4118064b7d8397edde9290b136f28d88.jpg
This image better explains “feministic rage”, but more like feministic lameness.
I can’t stand woke garbage but at the same time some people like him are just insane and blame wokeness on anything that’s not white and male which is just silly. There are some examples of actual woke crap in some games but I don’t see how this is one of those.
Piss off, why has the second character become black?
What the hell do you mean become black? Was she white before? Was she a man before? Go get some mental help you deranged nut job.
Yes, she was originally white
Glad Remedy found a hot black chick to replace her.
They did? Where?
You mean just like bombshell was supposed to be a hot blonde with skimpy clothes in storyboards?
Saga Anderson was white previously, but they changed her to be black yet kept the Swedish name Saga. It was more plausible for her to have this name when she was white because there are millions of Americans with Swedish ancestry, but a black American woman would almost certainly not be given this name. I have no problems with the skin colour, but her name does not fit.
Were they another race before, and changed into a black person for (presumably) some political reason? Or do you just have a problem when a game studio decides to have a black character in a video game?
Yes. She was
In the initial installment of the series, the law enforcement officer was a white man. In our nation, 13% of the populace is comprised of blacks; consequently, it follows that approximately 13% of characters featured in video games produced by American companies ought to represent individuals from this race. This stands in stark contrast to the current prevalence of 90% representation, which highlights the ongoing challenge of identifying whites in today’s games.
Maybe a mod will appear that will restore the original character.
Race swapping non white characters lead to banning in most modding sites as a deterrent, but let’s hope it appears aniway. But the problem is also the black accent that will need to change as well (probably).
They did replace an originally white female character with a black actress. But, from what I understand it’s because Remedy fell in love with the actress’ performance and said she’s who we’re going with. I’d much rather a stronger actress. And in other mediums like comics characters routinely change races, so really who gives a crap? Is the story compelling? Is the performance compelling? That’s what matters. Very tired of the toxic, racist discourse currently present in the gaming community.
“from what I understand it’s because Remedy fell in love with the actress’ performance and said she’s who we’re going with.”
Lol, and you really believe that? Can’t stand such naivete.
Excuuuuuuse me, they/them is an ACTOR, you gigantic N@ZI.
Also I 100% guarantee she was picked for being black.
The former. But i also have a problem with playing as characters i don’t want to play as.
I dunno I think she’s attractive. I will take her in a video game 1000x as long as I get to avoid the trans bartenders in Cyberpunk 2077 and Hogwart’s Legacy.
Consider it as a omen for things to come. Remedy developed lots of woke games lately so it comes as no surprise. But i’m not interested in finding out of the game is woke, why, because i’m not interested in playing as a black woman.
Most cutting edge feature that cant justify the performance penalty compared to visual fidelity its able to gained… Hence why chase of graphical fidelity in this generation just in vain, for me its better just to bring better AI, better gameplay, better world simulation, and better physic in todays game than just graphical improvement.Immortal of Aveum could be as great look as it is, but no one cares because it didnt have better gameplay, just the same old one
Where were you when Bioshock was released and it required a shader model 3 capable GPU ? “Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 128MB RAM and Pixel Shader 3.0”
When Battlefield 3 was released and required a directx 11 GPU ?
Tech moves on and those who don’t upgrade were usually left behind… but this had not happen for years until now with Alan Wake 2… I guess it’s because the PS4 and Xbox One are still around…
I could make that statement because I experienced it myself. I remember upgrading my GF MX400 to Radeon 9550 back in 2004 because of Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow that required hardware Pixel and Vertex Shader (and I remember that card priced less than $100 back in the day). The graphical difference is stark, you can justify why it need the upgrade that cant be achieved by the generation of GPU before.
Yes I have play Alan wake 2, and I can say the graphic is great but in the other hand it actually are not that different than Resident Evil 4 Remake in term of quality. If we set aside the fundamental build of the engine that using mesh shader and need new latest hardware , it just cannot justify the graphical upgrade visible in the surface compared to other that able to achieve it without.
I could play with some black women, but not play as a black woman, why would i want that?
Yay f*ck denuvo
The warning is not necessary, game will either run on your equipment or not, put out the recommends for this or that, if it’s below that there is no guarantee for the perf you’ll get. Most games can be refunded as well, no go then refund, dev lose the sale. Word gets around pretty quick too. If a dev is genuinely interested in maximizing sales then excluding a few of the top steam survey cards is pretty crazy, wasn’t going to happen.
Compared to how other games look visually and yet run on old hardware, this POS garbage doesn’t look good enough to eliminate 9 or specially 10 series. It is the pc and must have scalability. This is artificially trying to imply you have something next gen,which actually can’t even compete with good current gen titiles. as i said before,remedy is the king of crappy running pc games,now add not running at all ones to it.
10fps Alan Wake on a 980TI is better then 20fps Cities Skylines on a 4090
Expect Alan Wake 2 to be a permanent EGS exclusive on PC.
Yep, Just like Half Life, Counter Strike, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, and DotA 2 permanently Steam exclusive
Expect Alan Wake 2 to be a permanent EGS exclusive on PC.
dont even care if it has denuvo. will be playing free on gamepass with a code i got off a bag of doritos
Let’s download the Shaniqua Woke and see if it’s possible to play for and hour without puking.
This reminds of that time I bought the terrible Terminator 3: War of the Machines for PC and it would launch on my crappy PC, but because the integrated GPU did not have the proper shader models it was just a mess of polygons and visuals glitches…
Never got to actually play it back in 2004 or something like that…