Introduction

Alan Wake II is a survival horror game set 13 years after the original story. Players control FBI agent Saga Anderson investigating ritualistic murders in Bright Falls, Washington. Trapped in an alternate dimension, novelist Alan Wake crafts a horror narrative to escape, involving Saga. Players alternate between Saga and Alan, balancing resources like batteries and ammunition. New features include detective elements, a dialogue tree system, and the "Mind Place" for investigation.


Alan Wake II is developed by Remedy Entertainment, a famous development studio based in Finland. Remedy is well-known for their expertise in creating immersive narratives and innovative gameplay experiences, with titles like Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control under their belt.

The game is published by Epic Games, and available exclusively on the Epic Games Store. It is not available on Steam, but might come there at a later date, probably in around a year or so, similar to other EGS exclusives.

Alan Wake II is powered by the Northlight Engine, which is also developed by Remedy Entertainment. It has been featured in titles such as Control before. There have been substantial upgrades for Alan Wake II. You now have support for ray tracing, DLSS, Frame Generation, AMD FSR, Path Tracing, NVIDIA Ray Reconstruction, and others.

This benchmark review will evaluate the performance of Alan Wake 2 on a wide selection of modern graphics cards, show image quality comparisons and look at what's required in terms of VRAM usage.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at maximized settings, with DLAA enabled, and ray tracing / path tracing disabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• Alan Wake forces you to enable either DLSS or FSR. A native rendering option is not available!
• You may choose "native" by setting Render Resolution to match your screen resolution. This is possible for both DLSS and FSR
• DLSS Frame Generation is supported. When enabled, it will automatically enable Reflex, there is no separate toggle for Reflex
• V-Sync can be disabled, there is no hidden FPS cap

• There's three quality presets "High," "Medium" and "Low"
• In our build changing the preset didn't change the Post-Processing Quality, which defaulted to "Low." Make sure to change that
• Besides that there's many options to improve performance and fine-tune everything

• The ray tracing section lets you choose from four RT profiles, which are independent from the main quality settings: "Off," "Low," "Medium," and "High"
• DLSS Ray Reconstruction is supported on all GeForce RTX cards. It improves the look of RT effects by replacing the denoiser and combining the DLSS and Ray Tracing passes. When enabled, the options "Direct Lighting Denoising Quality" and "Path Traced Indirect Lighting Denoising Quality" will be disabled automatically, because the RR denoiser is used.
• "Direct Lighting" lets you enable ray traced lighting for light sources like your flashlight.
• "Path Traced Indirect Lighting" uses more accurate rendering for ambient light sources. This setting also controls whether screen-space reflections are enabled or not. There is no separate toggle for RT reflections.
• "Transparency" specifically deals with ray traced reflections in transparent objects like glass windows.