If there’s a perfect new game to play this Halloween, it’s Alan Wake 2.
The highly anticipated title from Remedy Studios takes Alan’s already complex story in new and mind-bending directions, with thought-provoking puzzles and tense Resident Evil-style gameplay.
Geeks aren’t so much talking about the game’s complex and overlapping storylines with Remedy’s other franchises but the gloriously advanced graphics showcasing the studio’s latest Northlight game engine.
Real-time path-traced lighting and reflections, mesh shaders and scarily realistic motion capture of human faces are some of the tricks we’re being treated to by the good folks from Espoo, Finland.
A game that could melt your PC as nastily as a Nazi staring into the Ark of the Covenant
It’s not the gloomy Pacific Northwest setting, jump scares or next-gen graphics that are freaking PC gamers out about the game, though. It’s the minimum system requirements needed to play it in the first place.
To meet the minimum spec for basic 1080p 30fps gaming, you’ll need an i5 7600K or equivalent CPU, RTX 2060 graphics card, and at least 16GB RAM. Ouch.
For anything approaching the glory that is fully path-traced lighting and reflective surfaces, gamers must have a long hard look in their misty rasterised mirrors and ask themselves: Can I justify spending hundreds of pounds on upgrading my rig to enjoy this game as intended?
If internet forums are anything to go by, the standard answer to this soul-searching question is: err, fuck no.
Read the spec sheet below and learn your fate:
What the hell did you expect?
To be fair to Remedy, given the enormously advanced nature of the game’s graphics engine, you would expect to need pretty modern hardware to get the best out of it.
Low or medium settings, the common presets the consoles are using, may sound bad, but given the prowess of the fundamentals of the engine, they produce excellent results. The names are all relative to the overall level—something many angry internet nerds have failed to understand.
In response to the shitstorm online, Remedy posted a reassuring tweet that confirmed the recommendations were effectively the developer playing it safe. So, it’s safe to assume that if you have hardware in the ballpark of what’s recommended, you should be fine.
Mesh shaders are what you should fear the most
If there’s one graphics feature you really will need to play the game properly, it’s mesh shader support.
Mesh shaders have been supported since 2018, but it’s only now we’re starting to see them being used in AAA games.
They replace vertex shaders, which control the geometry of 3D objects in the game world. Mesh shaders allow billions of triangles to be used on objects without the previous performance hit.
So, if you hate bad circles on game objects as much as I do, you’ll be delighted to see this technology finally deployed by developers.
All modern GPUs support mesh shaders, as does Apple with their just announced M3 silicon. But if you’re still rocking a GTX 1080 ti or a similarly old GPU, you’re doomed to single-digit frame rates in Alan Wake 2.
A Remedy we might have needed
It’s never a good surprise to see your once-prized PC hardware ground into dust by a new game. But that’s the price of progress.
For those of us who get unnaturally excited about breakthroughs in PC graphics fidelity, what Remedy is serving up here is precisely what we’ve asked for. It’s what makes PC gaming so exciting.
So the question you must ask yourself is: are you up for it? If not, there’s always a console you can play it on. Now, that’s a scary thought…
