Path Traced Indirect Lighting Performance Compared
On this page we are now going to look at how Path Traced Indirect Lighting affects Ray Tracing performance in Alan Wake 2. In this game, Path Tracing is only used for the Indirect Lighting graphics, not global illumination like Cyberpunk 2077 2.0. This means that we shouldn’t see the large drop or burden on performance that is experienced in Cyberpunk 2077 here. In this game, Path Traced Indirect Lighting might actually be usable, so let’s see what it costs to enable it.
To test this, we again chose to set custom settings for the Ray Tracing options. We started with the High Preset, and then manually lowered the Path Traced Indirect Lighting option from OFF, to Low to Medium to High to see the impact it makes on performance.
4K – Native Rendering with DLAA
As we can see, with Path Traced Indirect Lighting turned OFF, we start out at 35 FPS with High Ray Tracing options, and Ray Reconstruction is on as well. We are running at 4K display resolution and 4K rendering resolution here. Then, when we enable Path Traced Indirect Lighting we see a drop of only 11% performance. That is very small, considering. Moving up to Medium Path Traced Indirect Lighting the drop is even less at 3%, and then moving up to High drops performance 7%. Therefore, comparing High Path Traced Indirect Lighting to not having it all, is a total performance burden or drop of 20% without DLSS upscaling enabled. Let’s see what DLSS upscaling does below.
4K – Quality DLSS (2560×1440 Rendering Resolution)
DLSS upscaling certainly improves performance, and without Path Traced Indirect Lighting we almost hit 60 FPS at 4K display resolution with Quality DLSS upscaling. Turning on LOW Path Traced Indirect Lighting drops performance 10%, slightly less than without DLSS. The difference between Medium and Low is very small, Medium only drops performance 2%. Going up to High drops performance 4%. Therefore, enabling High Path Traced Indirect Lighting from OFF is a total drop of 15% when DLSS upscaling is enabled, which is less of a burden or drop without using DLSS upscaling.