Ahead of launching, Alan Wake 2 made the news because it required graphics cards with hardware support for DirectX 12 Ultimate's Mesh Shaders feature. That left unsupported GPUs like NVIDIA's GTX 1000 series and AMD's RX 5000 Series in the dust.
Digital Foundry revealed in a new video that developer Remedy Entertainment is about to release a new patch for the PC version of Alan Wake 2 that aims to improve performance for those GPUs. They were able to test the update before its public deployment (currently scheduled for Wednesday, March 6), reporting great news for NVIDIA's Pascal graphics cards.
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According to DF's Alex Battaglia, the GTX 1060 registered a 45% performance improvement on average, with an uptick that goes up to an impressive 3x in specific areas like the Mind Place.
The GTX 1060 actually got the lowest performance gain out of all Pascal GPUs after this Alan Wake 2 update. The GTX 1070 received a 57% improvement on average; the GTX 1080 leaps by 85%, while the top-of-the-line Pascal GPU, the GTX 1080Ti, now runs over twice as fast as it did when Alan Wake 2 launched, nearing 60 frames per second (at 1080p with AMD FSR 2 set to Quality and PlayStation 5-like graphics settings).
Other graphics cards without hardware support Mesh Shaders don't fare as well, though. The AMD RX 580, for instance, seems to crash a lot and also runs far worse than the GTX 1060, at around 15 frames per second. The newer AMD RX 5700, on the other hand, received a meager 2% improvement with this patch and still suffers from frame time spikes.
Interestingly, Digital Foundry also measured noticeable improvements with Ada Lovelace GPUs from the latest NVIDIA RTX 40 Series. The RTX 4070, for instance, ran 14% faster without path tracing enabled and 6% faster with path tracing.
Remedy recently confirmed that Alan Wake 2 sold over 1.3 million units to date, becoming their fastest-selling game yet. The Finnish studio plans to release two DLCs (Night Springs and Lake House) later this year.
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Alan Wake 2 was easily one of the best games last year, and that's saying something when you stand back and look at how amazing 2023 was. A lot of that was down to how Alan Wake 2 experimented with bold and interesting features, and the Dark Place was a hub for Remedy to go wild with unique ideas such as light shifting and reality swapping. However, these features may not have been added had Remedy not first created a confusing and complex Dark Place prototype in the first place.
Alan Wake 2's Case Board was given such overwhelmingly negative feedback during development due to its "anxiety-inducing" mechanical depth that it had to be toned down a ton for the final game.
Remedy has good news for fans of Alan Wake and Control, hinting that the time between games won't be as long as the wait between Alan Wake 2 and its predecessor. As the Remedy universe continues to grow, the studio behind Alan Wake and Control has ambitious goals for both series.
Tero Virtala, the CEO of Remedy Entertainment, has made it clear that upcoming Alan Wake sequels will be coming out more steadily. The original game was released in 2010, but Alan Wake 2 didn’t hit the market until October 2023.
Control and Alan Wake have both brought Remedy Entertainment plenty of success in recent years, with Control having sold 4 million units, and Alan Wake 2 hitting 1.3 million sales to become the studio’s fastest-selling game. It’s no surprise, then, that the developer intends to keep expanding both franchises with more new releases going forward.
Today, Remedy released its latest quarterly report for the period between October and December 2023. Despite the successful launch of Alan Wake 2, which was the fastest-selling game ever made by the studio even launching in a highly competitive release window, Q4 2023 marked a decrease in both revenue and profitability compared to 2022 due to significantly increased investments in the other game projects and to the impairment charge cost (€ -7.2 million) related to the reboot of the free-to-play Project Vanguard, from now on known as Kestrel.
An incredibly creative fan of Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2 has made a LEGO version of the game's highly memorable We Sing musical sequence. Having been released in October 2023, Alan Wake 2 was able to stand out in a year filled with incredible gaming experiences. The popular sequel later went on to earn eight nominations at the 2023 Game Awards, including one for Game of the Year, and won Best Narrative, Game Direction, and Art Direction.
Alan Wake 2 fans received an encouraging update after writer, director, and actor Sam Lake posted an image commemorating his final motion-capture work for the game's DLC, suggesting that the expansions are nearing completion. Lake previously outlined the plans for Alan Wake 2's post-launch additions.