Graphics Quality Presets Compared
As we mentioned at the onset, this Alan Wake 2 performance review focuses on comparing the quality setting options in Alan Wake 2 on a single graphics card. We are going to use the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition for all testing today. The goal of this review is to see how the quality options scale in performance, and how much of a graphics hog certain things are like Ray Tracing and Path Tracing. GPU comparisons will be done in the future, today we are focused on the game features themselves.
In our first round of testing, we are going to look at the three built-in Quality Preset options that Alan Wake 2 has. We will also test a fourth option, which is to set the highest quality by ourselves, manually, past the High Preset as we indicated on Page 1. This will show what the maximum quality performance is like compared to the presets. All of this testing on this page is without Ray Tracing, we are purely testing the main base performance of the game, raster performance if you will.
4K – Native Rendering with DLAA
As you can see above, at “Low” Quality Preset we start off with a playable 81 FPS at 4K resolution and 4K rendering resolution (Native Rendering) with DLAA. Moving up to the “Medium” Quality Preset drops performance by 6% down to 76 FPS, but it is still very playable. When we move up to the “High” Quality Preset performance drops by a larger 13% but the game is still playable above 60 FPS. Finally, turning on the highest quality options manually decreases performance by 14% from High Quality and does bring performance below 60 FPS. Therefore, we do see a larger drop in performance going to High Quality and then to custom highest settings. Moving from Low up to High is a total of a 19% drop in performance, and moving from Low to Custom Highest Settings is a total of a 30% drop in performance.
Another way to look at it is that dropping from High to Medium gives you a 15% boost to performance. Moving to High from Custom Highest Settings saves you 16% of performance. Moving to Low from Medium gives you only a 7% boost in performance.
4K – Quality DLSS (2560×1440 Rendering Resolution)
Now we are doing the same test as above, but we are using Quality DLSS upscaling. The first thing to note is that with Quality DLSS upscaling, every quality setting in the game is very playable, even Custom Highest Settings at 82 FPS. Moving up from Low to Medium Quality drops performance by just 9%. Moving from Medium to High drops performance by just 8%. Moving to Custom Highest Settings from High drops performance by 11%. Overall, what’s interesting, is that with DLSS enabled the differences in performance between each game quality setting are lessened than without DLSS. There’s less of a difference between quality settings in performance when DLSS is used. Using High Quality instead of Custom Highest Settings boosts performance 12%, and moving to Medium from High boosts performance 9%.
4K – Quality DLSS (2560×1440 Rendering Resolution) + DLSS 3 Frame Generation
Once again, these are the same tests as above but now we enabled DLSS 3 Frame Generation in addition to Quality DLSS Super Resolution. Frame Generation really ups the performance level, even with Custom Highest Settings we are still getting solidly above 100 FPS smoothness. The difference between quality settings is even less with Frame Generation. Moving up to Medium from Low only drops performance by 6%. Moving to High from Medium drops performance only by 7%, and moving to Custom Highest Settings from High only drops performance by 7%. There is simply no reason not to run the highest game settings with Frame Generation enabled at 4K.
4K – Native Rendering with DLAA
The last thing we wanted to test here was how the quality settings perform at 1440p instead of 4K, so we simply dropped the display resolution and rendering resolution down to 1440p. At 1440p the game is very playable at the highest custom settings, in native rendering, no upscaling needed at 94 FPS. At this lower resolution, there is also a lesser distance between quality settings. Moving up to Medium from Low is a 6% drop in performance. Moving to High from Medium is a 10% drop in performance, and from High to Custom Highest Settings is a 12% drop in performance. Therefore, dropping from custom highest settings to High is a boost of 14% and to Medium from High is a boost of 11%.