Alan Wake 2 on Xbox Series X improves on PS5 performance

Alan Wake 2 is one of the best-looking video games ever made. With beautiful lighting and intricate asset detail, it's a bit of a technical showcase, especially on PC with path tracing enabled. The PS5 release also looks brilliant, as I covered last week, with the similar visuals bereft of some path-tracing niceties and with some image quality issues. However, I didn't spend a huge amount of time looking at the differences between quality and performance modes. Meanwhile, review code for Xbox Series machines didn't arrive until launch, which raises a couple of key questions: does Series X match or improve upon PS5? Does Xbox Series S have the power to deliver a decent Alan Wake 2 experience?

On PS5 and Series X, Alan Wake offers a quality mode and a performance mode, which target 30 and 60 frames per second respectively. Remedy has gone a lot further than just tweaking resolution, however, with the developers cutting back a range of settings to hit the higher performance mode target, though most of these alterations are fairly subtle.

Most obviously, the density of environmental objects is decreased quite a lot in the performance mode. Plants that are present in the quality mode are often entirely absent when we switch to the performance mode. Grass also tends to see a reduction in density, with a more sparse, patchy appearance. Scattered leaves and rocks are similarly thinned out. Both modes look perfectly fine on their own terms, but the quality mode looks significantly more lush in head-to-heads, with abundant, thick foliage. While we're looking at the terrain, the performance mode also seems to have a slightly cruder terrain surface, with less obvious displacement for ground details. This is most obvious up close, where the ground clearly features less geometry than the quality mode.

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