Alan Wake 2: a deep dive into Remedy's high-end ray tracing
A deep dive into Alan Wake 2's graphics at their path-traced best, along with optimised settings for mid-range GPUs.
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Alan Wake 2 is sublime - a masterclass in the visual arts - and while it still manages to look fine on consoles from Xbox Series S upwards, it's with high-end PC that you get to see Remedy's masterpiece at its absolute best thanks to hardware-accelerated ray tracing, path tracing and DLSS 3.5 ray reconstruction. The question is: do you need best-of-the-best hardware like RTX 4080 or RTX 4090 to benefit from the experience? Well, it's a demanding experience to be sure, but we were happy with the results we gleaned from RTX 3080 and its nearest 40-series equivalent, RTX 4070, both running at 1440p output resolution. And of course, those settings can and will provide similar scalability on other RT-capable GPUs, though your mileage may vary.
There's scalability then, but let's kick off by taking a look at the individual RT features and what they actually do. Ray-traced direct lighting essentially adds RT shadows to all light sources. Alan Wake 2's standard shadow maps can be temporally unstable, and also switch from different quality shadows depending on distance, resulting in some obvious 'popping' as you move through the cascade.
Rasterised shadows also have a uniform sharpness to them, whereas in real life, shadows are sharper the closer to the casting light source they are, tapering off into the distance. This is linked to another problem: not every object casts shadows. RT shadows in Alan Wake 2 solve each and every one of these issues, while common problems in other games with this effect are also side-stepped. RT shadows often do not animate, for example. This particularly jarring on elements like vegetation, but it's not an issue in this game.
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