Alan Wake 2 will have path tracing, DLSS 3 can provide up to 4.7X performance boost

Alan Wake 2 is just around the corner. We've already had a look at the demanding PC system requirements and now, we get to dive into exactly why the game requires such beefy hardware. The simple answer is ray-tracing, and lots of it.

The team at Remedy began pushing graphical boundaries with Control, one of the first ambitious attempts to bring ray-tracing effects into a game. While many games at the time were sticking to either shadows or reflections, Remedy opted to include a more full suite of ray-tracing effects in Control, including transparent reflections, shadows, diffuse lighting and even ray-traced debris. Now with Alan Wake 2, Remedy is dialling things up once again.

Alan Wake 2 will ship with full path-tracing, becoming one of just a handful of released games to support the technology. This unlocks the full potential of ray-tracing but it comes at a heavy performance cost, which is where DLSS 3 comes in. DLSS 3 is currently an essential requirement for achieving truly playable frame rates with path tracing enabled, which is the main reason you can't switch it on in Cyberpunk 2077 without an RTX 40 series GPU.

Of course, you can dial down to standard ray-tracing settings or toggle certain settings off to achieve more performance on cards that don't support DLSS 3. If you activate DLSS and ray-tracing in Alan Wake 2, Nvidia's ray-reconstruction technology will automatically switch on too, so you'll get better RT fidelity while using the AI upscaling to save on performance.

In Alan Wake 2, the RT Medium and RT High presets both enable path tracing, with the medium setting offering one ray bounce and RT Ambient Occlusion on the last hit. The High preset will trace three ray bounces for even more realistic lighting. The RT Low preset disables path tracing.

Alongside the RTX launch trailer for Alan Wake 2, we also get our first benchmarks. According to Nvidia, at 4K with an RTX 4090 and DLSS 3, you'll be able to max out the game with ray-tracing and still achieve 120FPS. Meanwhile, RTX 4080 users should see a 4.1X performance improvement with DLSS 3. At 1440p, RTX 4070 users will be able to achieve 80+FPS with max settings, including ray-tracing.

Alan Wake 2 officially releases on the 27th of October. The game is also a freebie for anyone picking up an RTX 40 series graphics card this month.

KitGuru Says: Are you planning to pick up Alan Wake 2 later this week? 

Become a Patron!