NVIDIA has confirmed that Alan Wake 2 will be launching on October 27 with full ray tracing and DLSS 3.5, and with that announcement comes a new video that teases how the game might look and run on some of today’s most powerful hardware. According to the technology overview that NVIDIA posted this morning, owners of the GeForce RTX 4090, the fastest gaming GPU on the market, can expect frame rates of up to 123 FPS in the game when DLSS 3.5 is enabled at 4K, with full ray tracing. This number is a bit lower than what NVIDIA shared in its 4K benchmarks for the game, which suggest the GeForce RTX 4090 can deliver up to 134.4 FPS at max settings with DLSS 3.5.
Remedy Entertainment shared the PC requirements for Alan Wake II last week, revealing that the new sequel only officially supports NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, AMD Radeon RX 6600, or newer graphics cards. This is because the game requires a GPU that includes support for mesh shaders, according to a Remedy dev.
Alan Wake II Ray Tracing Presets
If you’re using an older GeForce RTX GPU, you can scale performance by selecting the Medium or Low Ray Tracing presets:
| Ray Tracing Presets | Low | Medium | High |
| Path Tracing In Use | NONE | Partial (1 bounce, RT AO on last hit) | Full (3 bounces, RT AO on last hit) |
| Path Traced Indirect Lighting Quality | OFF | MEDIUM | HIGH |
| Ray Traced Direct Lighting | ON | ON | ON |
| Ray Traced Transparency | LOW | HIGH | HIGH |
Alan Wake II Denoiser Presets (DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction Disabled)
For best performance, ensure that DLSS Ray Reconstruction is enabled. If DLSS Ray Reconstruction is disabled or not available, two denoisers will instead be enabled, with the quality and performance cost scaling across the three presets:
| NRD Direct Lighting Denoising Quality | LOW | HIGH | HIGH |
| NRD Indirect Lighting Denoising Quality | N/A | MEDIUM | HIGH |
In Alan Wake 2, full ray tracing cranks the quality of ray-traced effects to 11. Transparent and opaque reflections recreate their surroundings at full resolution, heightening immersion.
Indirect and direct light bounces up to three times, while techniques such as Screen Space Reflections, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and rasterized Global Illumination are unified into a single algorithm, enabling the rendering of naturally lit locales with greater detail and realism.
In forests, players will experience spectacular lighting, rich shadowing, and extreme levels of detail, highlighting some of the most realistic visuals seen to date in a game.
And during Alan Wake’s nightmare, players will explore subways and misty city streets with diffuse lighting, pixel-perfect reflections, beautiful volumetric effects, and more.
