When it launched last October, Alan Wake 2 was noted as a superb follow-up to its cult Xbox 360 predecessor. Visually, it was something to behold. However, being quite a graphically demanding game meant people with older hardware were left out—until now.
Recently, Eurogamer was given exclusive access to an upcoming patch for Alan Wake 2 which aims to optimize the sequel for previous-gen graphics cards. Specifically, the update will put focus on making the game compatible with Nvidia GTX 10-series GPUs, powered by the Pascal architecture.
In a benchmark test, a Digital Foundry video found that, once the patch starts rolling out on March 6, those with GTX hardware should see some pretty significant upticks in performance.
It’s not a cure-all, though
Currently, the likes of the GTX 1060 (which is the fourth most used GPU on Steam) don’t support mesh shaders, something AW2 uses for better visual acuity. However, the new patch should fix this.
The video above shows that framerates do increase, boosting overall performance by around 45%, even up as much as 85% for the likes of the GTX 1080.
However, the aforementioned 1060 is still not entirely suitable for the game to run at a decent rate. While Digital Foundry saw increases from 15 to 25 frames on average (thanks to the removal of mesh shaders) in dense areas, this still falls short of what most gamers expect these days, which is 30fps at the very minimum.
There also appear to be no optimizations for the AMD equivalent, the RX 580, a card that came out in 2017. Given that Team Red is no longer supporting this GPU, it’s probably not in Remedy’s best interests to make Alan Wake 2 compatible with this (and much older) hardware.
