DF Weekly: Alan Wake 2 delivers a day of reckoning for older PC GPU owners

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.

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