A couple of days ago, Remedy shared the official PC system requirements for Alan Wake 2. Compared to other upcoming triple-A games, these PC specs appear to be quite high. After all, Remedy recommends an NVIDIA RTX2060 for its Low Settings. However, it appears there is a reason why the team has not listed any of the NVIDIA 10 and AMD 5000 series GPUs.
According to Remedy’s Lea-Newin, Alan Wake 2 will require graphics cards that support mesh shaders. And, as you may have guessed, both the NVIDIA 10 and AMD 5000 series do not support Mesh Shaders at all.
In short, Alan Wake 2 will be one of the first games that will take full advantage of DX12 Ultimate.
Ironically, a lot of PC gamers have been wondering when they’d see a game that supports Mesh Shaders. And now that a game requires them, the exact same people are crucifying Remedy.
For what it’s worth, Remedy has been constantly pushing the graphical boundaries of PC games. Remember Quantum Break? That game came out in 2016, and it took it four years until it was playable at 4K. CONTROL was also one of the best-looking games of its time. And now Alan Wake 2 will have Path Tracing effects.
Again, it’s really funny witnessing PC gamers constantly asking for a new “Crysis” game. And when a “Crysis” game does appear on the horizon, those same folks start calling it an “unoptimized mess”. Here is a fun fact. Crysis WAS unoptimized when it came out (due to its awful CPU utilization as it was single-threaded).
The same also happens with most UE5 games that use Nanite and Lumen. Nanite is a game-changer and does not have a big performance hit. People mistakenly believe that Nanite is a resource hog. It’s not. On the other hand, Lumen can be really taxing. What people fail to understand is that Lumen is actually a form of ray tracing. So of course and it will be demanding.
Anyway, Remedy will release Alan Wake 2 on October 27th!
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.”
Contact: Email
There’s a difference between a game that is demanding and difficult to run on high settings but can still run OK on low end systems on low settings, and a game that runs like sh*t on all settings. The majority of people have low end GPU’s, with the GTX 1060 and the GTX 1650 being the most popular in the Steam hardware surveys for quite some time now (although every now and then the RTX 3060 does take the lead). I’m also seeing the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1660 Super in the top 10 in the most recent results.
Game developers are clearly not making games for the GPU’s that people have. This is a major issue, and I think any rage over this is justified. Games that fail to account for the most common hardware on the market (low end GPU’s of the GTX 10, GTX 16, RTX 20, and RTX 30 series) deserve to be commercial failures.
Also, screw mandatory raytracing in general. I have an RTX 3070 Ti, and I hate to enable raytracing. Aside from it being a massive waste of performance, it also usually adds very little to games aesthetically. I think raytracing is still 5-10 years away from being able to run with reasonable enough performance for most gamers to bother turning it on for anything more than just a quick look out of curiosity.
Depends, I for example love to run old-school classics like Quake, Half-Life and Serious Sam with path-tracing mods, and can’t imagine going back to their original versions.
Improvements like that simply can’t be “unseen”, you know…
Cant be more agree , it feels nostalgic but very pleasant to look at even when its still the same low res texture and low poly game from when we enjoy it back then. That realistic lighting effect only made it like a toy or diorama made with our own hand, its not perfectly shaped ,painted or crafted but its real, like we can actually touch it
While the graphical improvements of those old games with path tracing are sometimes rather impressive (although not always), the performance being so poor means I’d rather just play the original game with ReShade and enjoy the high FPS and whatever effects I feel like injecting.
Yes let’s make all new games look like they are 5-6 years old so they can run on 5-6 year old GPUs ……
The problem with doing that is then the technology stagnates because everything is made for the least common denominator instead of pushing forward and breaking barriers.
The technology stagnate because of there is a limit in term of graphical fidelity that at some point our eyes cant even differentiate. Todays non-RT (a.k.a raster) tech already able to emulate light properties very well that won’t make our brain says it looks weird or out of place when we saw it. Then RT come and our brain said it looks a bit better but the game performance tanked without enough trade off with graphical fidelity they get.
Yes it more realistic, but most of the time our brain didnt care, we know its a game, it didnt need to be and devs already create many raster tech that already able to emulate that light effect very well (look at something like SVOGI for example) without performance impact RT gave.
In my opinion, graphical fidelity are already done great and its time now for better A.I, better physic simulation, better animation and better gameplay to take over. If not we will only get games like last year COD that have photorealistic graphic in campaign but we just unable to interact with everything around it and awful enemy A.I that just standing there to shoot
Raster tech is going the way of the Dodo bird and in 5-10 years everything will be rendered through AI techniques.
The hardware itself has hit a wall (Not much to be gained going forward with smaller node sizes) and the only way around that is using AI techniques. We are already seeing that with antialiasing and now Ray Reconstruction.
However just like the move to 3D in the mid to late 90’s there is going to be some growing pains but someone has got to take the leap. So far it’s only CDPR and Remedy but soon everyone will either jump on the bandwagon or get left behind and die
Game developers can still advance technology without making games run like garbage on low end systems. This is something they used to know very well how to do. That’s why there are “High” and “Low” graphics settings in video games.
No devs are pushing barriers, all games are designed around console’s capabilities and limitations. But let’s choose to ignore the elephant in the room anyway, which devs choosing to not optimize their games for pc
True …. which is why the minimum requirements now are a 3700X and 5700XT/6700XT and with that you can only expect 30 FPS with most of the eye candy turned on and 60 FPS at low settings ….. Just like with a PS5.
That leaves the 1060 and even the 1660 out of the loop …… Along with any CPU weaker than a 3700X
Thanks for the essay. Let me sum it up for everyone: My name is GT PC Gaming and I’m a filthy casual peasant who doesn’t even have an RTX 4080 and I’m a whiny little b*tch
But thats the point of PC gaming since ages ago, except if youre new to them that just wanted to show off. Playing games according to the hardware we have is the PC gaming at its core, only since probably PS4/XbOne era ,when the console CPU are pretty lame with mediocre GPU, where it become a show off like “Mwahahah my PC run your peasant console game in ultra max setting and in 4K”, back then we just playing games according to our PC Spec and we enjoy it
You’re right, I don’t have an RTX 4080. I have an RTX 3070 Ti. Am I a whiny little b*tch? I’m sure some people think so, but I’m also not afraid to state my opinion (which seems to be the case for you as well), and my opinion is that games should perform well at low settings on low end hardware even if they take an RTX 4090 to run on high settings, and that game developers shouldn’t lock their games from running on older hardware just because it’s lacking some special feature.
In the world of PC gaming we used to have certain unwritten standards, and one of those was that game developers wouldn’t lock their games out from running on older hardware even if that hardware wasn’t officially supported. While I also don’t agree with the idea that games should perform badly even on low settings if you don’t have a current generation GPU, the whole idea of making it physically impossible to play a game unless you have a new enough graphics card is ridiculous.
I’m sorry you were born stupid, and then your wh*re of mom repeatedly dropped you on your head.
I am full in here (even though my GPU will barely meet the requirements) for Remedy. They always do excellent job in terms of graphics. So fingers crossed for it. Not a big fan of Alan Wake but let them crush the hardwares in the proper way.
I am full in here (even though my GPU will barely meet the requirements) for Remedy. They always do excellent job in terms of graphics. So fingers crossed for it. Not a big fan of Alan Wake but let them crush the hardwares in the proper way.
Can’t wait to run it on Linux with my 5700 XT using VKD3D in probably 1 month after release, tops.
I do like your enthusiasm about Linux, but keep in mind that Valve can’t do wonders and overcome hardware limitations.
I’ve just looked it up, and the Vulkan mesh shader support with RADV on AMDGPU requires RDNA2 hardware, so newer 6000 series.
And while there is the possibility that “VKD3D-Proton” (not just VKD3D, different project which is useless for DX12 games) could workaround the requirement for mesh shaders either by disabling them during the DX12-to-Vulkan translation or emulating that support via software, as they have done before, the result could very well be still unplayable on your 5700 XT.
Besides, keep in mind that AW2 won’t be even available on Steam (maybe even forever because of Epic Games / Tim “The Uber-Autist” Sweeney), so there is less incentive for Valve’s Linux & Vulkan developers to work on that game in the first place…
Linux mate, but AW2 cannot be forever on EGS right? I mean do you have any news on that I might be missing?
Don’t have any insider info on that, just basing my assumption on the fact that Epic is the publisher of AW2, who obviously want people to spend money on their own EGS.
And when you combine that with Sweeney’s hatred for Valve/GabeN, AW2 on Steam doesn’t look all that likely any time soon.
However, should Epic’s financial woes continue, maybe there could be a change of heart, simply out of necessity for Steam’s humongous money potential…
AW2 is funded by EPIC, so it will probably remain an EPIC exclusive. It’s fine
If Linux/RADV can emulate RT on GCN/RDNA1, I’m sure some shader stages magic would be a way smaller undertaking.
RT doesn’t need specific hardware to begin with. that’s why GPU like pascal able to run DXR despite not having any RT cores.
Just like I’m running RT on my 5700 XT.
this game is gonna be so pozzed and so shielded…
This is some revisionism history, Crysis was pretty good with it’s CPU otimizations for the time but it was very GPU heavy to max it, but the game scales to lower end video cards extraordinarily well. It made the game playable on a variety of hardware. This does not seem to be the case for this game AT ALL.
Don’t get me wrong, the promotion material does look good but requiring a 3070 for non-raytraced gameplay at “540p” resolution with mid settings is very worrisome.
Also Crysis became a thing not only because the game was demanding, it was a decent game for its time, it was playable at release.
This thing has not been proven to be either, although it is highly probable it will not be playable at release without patches and is already making the game NOT playable for a lot of poeple.
I’d argue “Horizon Forbidden west” and even “Gta 6” will look better and have less requirements than this overhyped TV tra$$
Horizon Forbidden West is a PS4 game, lol.
We’re talking PC here and an open world game vs linear dark corridor shooter. Hardware Scalability in AW2 seems ridiculous and only time will tell its performance.
Where did you buy you magic ball?
From ruins of Hamunaptra
Naah… I’m pretty sure GTA 6 requirements are gonna be way up there
“Ironically, a lot of PC gamers have been wondering when they’d see a game that supports Mesh Shaders. And now that a game requires them, the exact same people are crucifying Remedy.”
Who exactly? I don’t see any backlash on this. The only backlash I’m seeing is for the general system requirements and requiring upscaling.
I’m mostly seeing praise for Remedy raising the bar and use next gen features in Alan Wake 2.
They’re tearing it apart on r/PCMasterRace
Who was wondering for mesh shaders? Few graphics elitists? Majority wondered for fun gameplay again which this game won’t deliever. It looks like next forspoken or immortals of aveum. Those were graphical marvels too.
Add epic exclusivity to this and you get nonexistent PC sales.
As for Crysis – while it pushed boundaries, it also let plebs (who weren’t arab sheikhs) play with wide system reqs. Unlike this trash.
wtf are you even talking about?
Let’s face the reality …. Most Gamers are whiny little b*tches ……
This forum is proof positive of that …..
Seriously man, these guys just come here to complain.
I’mWithJoe on this one.
At least the regulars here actually discuss the topics at hand and call out things as they are. Ironically, all I see from the likes of you c*cks is going off-topic and kvetching about the users, kind of like these alleged “whiny little b*tches” you project about. You’re free to sod off to reddit and brainlessly f**late whatever latest “AAA” g0yslop modern day publishers crap onto your plate if you can’t handle opinions that do not line up with yours.
Ahmed go back to your country, they need you there.
but you are the Albanian muzzie living in Switzerland. I’m pretty sure Shieftain is whiter than your immigrant a$5
I’m sensing Serbian vibes and because that makes you the enemy of Turkish cockroaches, I’m not going to insult your country yet.
But as I’ve made it clear before, anyone who’s not a German is vermin to me.
Anyone with brown skin, black hair, or eyes is my enemy.
Hitler had black hair …. In fact a lot of Germans have black hair including my grandfather
Black hair is what Asians have, his hair was dark brown.
Hitler had black hair …. In fact a lot of Germans have black hair including my grandfather
Awww did someone get their widdle fweelings hurt?
How can it work on PS5… AFAIK it lacks mesh shaders implementation (DX12 or VK1.3+)
The same way it can do Ray Tracing and dozens of other graphics effects without DX12 or VK1.3+
It’s not a software limitation, it’s a hardware limitation. Apparently it has the RDNA 2 hardware architecture for mesh shaders even though the PS5 and Xbox Series X aren’t fully RDNA 2 but more like RDNA 1.75
Obviously software and HW in this case are linked together and programmer needs API to access the HW, which is missing AFAIK (but I don’t know PS5 enough)… that’s what I find strange. I wonder HOW did they implement it…
P.S. FYI PS5 uses Gnmx gfx API for ALL their games. Would be interesting if in this case Remedy used VK (for PSX) to access Mesh Shaders HW capabilities…
Alan Wake 2 = DAY ZERO BUY 👍
Epic+monstrous hardware demanding. Lot of people will skip it till it get on steam or cos simply they cant play it. Not a great plan
Epic+monstrous hardware demanding. Lot of people will skip it till it get on steam or cos simply they cant play it. Not a great plan
Weird take.
Crysis ran fine on hardware available on the market at the time.
Crysis looked great and had many graphics options that were demanding, but it was extremely scalable.
Alan Wake II is not like Crysis at all. Alan Wake II can’t even run on an RTX 3050, which is a card actively being sold by Nvidia.
Mesh shaders can pump up performance up to x400 with very complex geometry… This is scary: was this game so demanding that MS was the only solution to make it playable? 😧
Mesh shaders performance gain example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzjs9HTkIHw
Question: How can it work on PS5, which lacks the VK1.3 mesh shaders implementation?
skip it
It being woke n all is a diff topic, but one thing you can say about Remedy, their games visually/technically are quite advanced.
Rather have Vulkan instead. Way better.
No really. People are wet when they see Vulkan because of how awful and terrible OpenGL was to Vulkan and DX11.
Bad take.
Crysis was very scalable. Crysis was demanding at high settings and lauded for its revolutionary graphics. But Crysis was also very scalable.
You needed a high-end DX9 card for high settings. But Crysis also ran fine on a $150 GT 8500 on lower settings.
Alan Wake II can’t even run properly on a brand new RTX 4060 without DLSS, which is a $300 GPU. Unlike Crysis, Alan Wake II is actually unoptimized. And unlike Crysis, Alan Wake II does not look revolutionary.
Good point , I remember playing crysis with my IGP (Radeon Hd 3200), of course its in low and 600p30 resolution, but it just run
Still recall it pushed my 2x 8800 gtx’s to the limits. Kinda of glad and sad sli went away, was awesome when it worked but then came the temporal rendering tech (like taa etc) that basically killed of sli’s scaling due to bus limitations even if the games were coded “right”
John has shown to have the judgement of someone who has learned almost nothing for all his years following the gaming industry, so I’m not surprised.
That said, notice that Crysis scaled down on CPU and GPU, which is fine, but not up, especially with CPU cores number.
Crysis wasn’t unoptimized, you are just a filthy casual peasant john papadopoulos
I laughed at that point, its optimised for hardware of its era which is mostly high frequency clock and single core or dual core max.
Wondering how this game is going to look on consoles. Guessing upscaled 720p at 28fps
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/220914b656f0a711bbc189448a684b3648bb9d62e2d79dfa35154c455930fd09.gif
All of them are locked to 30fps lmao
Alan Wake II looks great, but not any better than A Plague’s Tale Requiem that has far lower system requirements. Alan Wake II is just unoptimized.
In-game screenshot comparison:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c117774e1930f3c3d2ec948d088168477f06959508dec51130fde241e4853858.jpg
RE4 Remake also looks almost the same with pretty reasonable requirement
RE4R Leon on PS5 looks worse than RE2R Leon on PS4. So … eh. Hell, his face looks worse than RE6 Leon on PS3.
He just uglier, black line outside of his lips like a smoker and curve cheek like homeless man. RE 2 Leon way more handsome.
Not really.
F* you John , this game is another case of lazy developers that’s barely know how to code and also having upscallers in mind , DX12 is a plague too , we have the most powerful GPUs in history by far nowadays but they can’t run those games at a playable frame rate at native resolution and need to use DLSS or FSR , a 24 GB Vram GPU for god sake , stop sucking the dicks of those developers mate !
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/3ff4348855b2abf610f989e8c203851e022a8b44b69d0e600055ab2523c7fcc4.jpg
That 3070 in this list is crazy.
It’s starting to make sense now. I was watching an IGN interview with Thomas Puha, from Rememdy Entertainment regarding Alan Wake 2.
He doesn’t believe in optimizing games. lol
Their philosophy is -buy a new GPU or don’t play our game-. No wonder Nvidia is sponsoring them, lol.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9114d21f5b6ae133bc7750f74bb3160d7a3cbfe4a8e450e79884744b0ef198a9.gif
I don’t mind developers that want to utilize new feature sets – Heck I admire them – Since they are the ones who push tech forward, instead of just more of basically the same. That said it should scale at least to the typical mind tier rig or they will no doubt lose tons of sales… and make a lot of peeps unhappy in the process. If everyone kept old hardware in mind all the time we would never see progress… seems they just pushed it too hard too fast.
They should be ashame to insomniac in optimisation regard
Dumb post. It’s a sh**ty post, stop being retarded.
All new games that come out should have these specs. Potato pc’s are holding things back.
“Lumen can be really taxing. What people fail to understand is that Lumen is actually a form of ray tracing”
Actual form of ray tracing actually performs better than lumen, which is designed with consoles in mind and also has less accuracy in terms of light distribution.
All those features, tools and other stuff from DX12 Ultimate and etc. was supposed to improve the game development and performance, but like always this was all just smoke and mirrors.
yup capitalism is rotten
Such bullshit, the game doesn’t even look thqat good as graphical fidelity goes. This is a basic (and obvious) example of scheduled obsolescence, sadly the PC “gaming” struggles with this nonsense since forever
It hasn’t come out yet to jump to such conclusion. Just wait and see.
Sure, but we had extended previews of Alan Wake 2, showcases, etc.. It looks good, but not astonishing or anything. I mean, compare Last of Us “Remake” with this game, they are not far apart as visual fidelity goes… and a GTX 1060 can handle Last of Us. Seems like the inclusion of this DX12 “ultimate” is just a gimmick to force the previous generation of GPUs out of the market
Why bring Crisis in to this? Bottom line with the exception of ray tracing and UE5 PC gamers have been playing games with the same tech for almost a decade. The only advancements in graphics aside those mentioned above is higher resolution and higher framerate. I applaud remedy for pushing gaming forward with use of not new but unused graphic tech. With new GPU lines being pushed out every 2 years gamers never get to see GPUs fully taken advantage of. Every new GPU architecture can push more polygons and things like mesh shaders but we never see it truly taken advantage of.
The game won’t run on RX 5000 or GTX 1000/1600 series. Minimum RX 6000 or RTX 2000 thanks to this Mesh Shader. It’s nothing like Cyberpunk.
PC gamers want good games, not broken games. terrible post.
A possible cause of the performance issues of Alan Wake II.
Mesh shaders move away from fixed pipeline and give the developers a lot more freedom. But that requires developers who know exactly what they are doing.
During an Xorg conference where Mesh Shaders are explained, Ricardo Garcia warns that a bad implementation of Mesh Shaders could drastically worsen performance instead of improve it.
“Giving users (developers) freedom in this part of the pipeline may allow them to shoot thesmelves in the foot and end-up with sub-optimal performance“.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/31303fd07ff0afb123868614351184b115e1dfeed35b087ffa44cc5a199eaa0d.png
BS take. Sh**ty port.
“Again, it’s really funny witnessing PC gamers constantly asking for a new “Crysis” game. And when a “Crysis” game does appear on the horizon, those same folks start calling it an “unoptimized mess”
Disingenuous comparison.
When Crysis came out it looked unlike anything out in the market and it would take years and the next generation to have an open world game with the same or higher of visual fidelity and technology. And on top of it, it was scalable, it could run on a variety of configurations with adequate performance.
Alan Wake 2 doesn’t look much better than a cross-gen game built for last gen hardware, and requires insane specs to run the game at medium settings and decent FPS, with DLSS enabled. And midway through 2024 we’ll likely already have a better looking game than this.
A possible cause of the performance issues of Alan Wake II.
Mesh shaders move away from fixed pipeline and give the developers a lot more freedom. But that requires developers who know exactly what they are doing.
During an Xorg conference where Mesh Shaders are explained, Ricardo Garcia warns that a bad implementation of Mesh Shaders could drastically worsen performance instead of improve it.
“Giving users (developers) freedom in this part of the pipeline may allow them to shoot thesmelves in the foot and end-up with sub-optimal performance“.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/31303fd07ff0afb123868614351184b115e1dfeed35b087ffa44cc5a199eaa0d.png
This is a similar warning that IDSoftware made when DX12 came out. The idea that developers vastly overestimate their own competence. DX12 allows a lot more freedom for developers, but that leaves far more room for errors and performance issues.
Remedy is the studio behind Quantum break which was a disaster on DX12, they themselves admitted they didn’t know what they were doing same engine was used for Control, and now they are the masters of DX12? I find that hard to believe.
This is just another NVIDIA tech demo.
if the PS5 has an RDNA 2.0 GPU equivalent to an RX 5700 XT and it’s not compatible with DirectX 12 API , how this game is running on this hardware ? can someone explain this, and by the way , how is it possible that both consoles have almost the same GPU but only Xbox Series X is compatible with DirectX 12 ? is it on a hardware level or just because DirectX 12 is a proprety of Microsoft ? does it mean all this sh*t of Mesh shader running only on Nvidia GPUs is locked behind a “Software” wall instead of a “Hardware” one ? Nvidia pushing gamers to purchase overpriced GPU it’s the new meaning of “THE WAY IT’S MEAN TO BE PLAYED” https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/48e440d435616db769c0943f6a26c3796b70aa9fc95c72d7a5d24279be977dd7.png