We’d been expecting a game to arrive that would practically demand that you upgrade your PC hardware, and it’s not entirely surprising that it would be Remedy’s Alan Wake 2. However, what we didn’t expect was it would be support for DX12 mesh shader hardware that would be the dividing line between a good experience and a bad one. Practically, what this means is that there’s bad news here for owners of vintage 2016/2017 Nvidia GTX 10-series Pascal hardware as Alan Wake 2 performance is pretty dire, even on the majestic GTX 1080 Ti. The lack of mesh shader support also means that AMD’s vintage 2019 RDNA 1 cards also suffer, though not quite to the same degree.
You can read all about what mesh shaders actually are elsewhere, but the bottom line is that it more easily allows for the efficient processing of detail-rich scenes – and Alan Wake 2 is awash with incredibly high detail assets. On PC, fallbacks exist to allow the game to run on older GPUs, but you have to accept some alarming drops in performance. Even on GTX 1080 Ti, I noted that the game could drop into the teens running at 1080p, upscaled from 720p using FSR 2 quality mode. In those same scenes, the RTX 2080 – often cited as having similar rasterisation performance to the 1080 Ti – runs 6.3x faster.
Those results are something of an outlier, but even in more standard AW2 gaming, there’s still a stark divide between three GPUs that generally have similar rasterisation capabilities. In the forest at the beginning of the game, the RTX 2080 beats 1080 Ti with an additional 177 percent of performance, while the RX 5700 XT is 63 percent faster than the Pascal legend.
0:00:00 Introduction0:00:45 News 01: Alan Wake 2: a tech masterpiece0:34:12 News 02: New PS5 needs internet to pair disc drive0:42:18 News 03: MGS Master Collection Volume 1 released0:58:16 News 04: MGS Delta Snake Eater demoed1:07:37 News 05: Star Citizen improvements, new content shown off at CitizenCon1:21:48 Supporter Q1: Given that Alan Wake 2 doesn’t support Pascal GPUs, is it time for a GTX 1080/Ti eulogy?1:28:51 Supporter Q2: Any thoughts on Intel’s 14th gen CPUs?1:31:24 Supporter Q3: How could Horizon Zero Dawn and TLOU 2 be meaningfully remastered for PS5?1:40:53 Supporter Q4: Are better visual features really worth the image quality hit on consoles?1:49:10 Supporter Q5: What are John’s impressions of the Meta Quest 3?
A day of reckoning was always coming for 10-series cards and up until the release of Alan Wake 2, the smart money would have been on mandatory support for hardware accelerated ray tracing representing the main reason to upgrade. The idea that it would be mesh shaders that would represent the dividing line does come as a bit of a surprise, but the bottom line is that the current generation consoles’ support for RT is a little lacklustre, while mesh shading support clearly works, as Alan Wake 2 looks stunning on today’s consoles. Even PlayStation 5, which features a less robust geometry engine, seems to deliver good results and strong performance.