DLSS Upscaling and DLSS 3 Frame Generation Performance
Now that we have looked at all the special graphics features in Alan Wake 2, let’s take a look at the advantage that DLSS Upscaling and DLSS 3 Frame Generation has to performance. For these tests we’ll run at 4K display resolution, and turn on Quality DLSS (2560×1440 Render Resolution Upscaling), and also DLSS 3 Frame Generation in order to see the percentage advantages in performance those allow. We’ll run the game at our Custom Highest Graphics Settings, and also the High-Quality Setting Preset, and then also with High Ray Tracing Quality Preset.
4K – Custom Highest Quality Settings
Without DLSS Upscaling performance is at 57 FPS at the custom highest quality settings, and 4K display and 4K render resolution. Enabling Quality DLSS Upscaling improves performance by 44% to 82 FPS and the game is smooth and playable. When we enable DLSS 3 Frame Generation on top of that smoothness increases by another 44%. The total improvement with DLSS+Frame Gen is 107% from native resolution.
4K – Custom Highest Quality Settings
Now we are moving down to the built-in High Quality Preset in Alan Wake 2. We start off at 66 FPS at 4K display and render resolution, which is playable. Enabling DLSS Upscaling improves performance by 39% and brings it to 91 FPS. Enabling DLSS 3 Frame Generation improves performance another 38%. The total performance advantage with DLSS+Frame Gen is 92% compared to native resolution. We can see that upping the quality setting above allows a DLSS and Frame Gen to offer a higher performance advantage.
4K – High Ray Tracing Preset
In the above graph we have now enabled the High Ray Tracing Quality preset, and this does have Ray Reconstruction enabled. The performance starts off at 28 FPS, which is not playable. When we enable DLSS Upscaling the performance increases by 79% to 50 FPS, which still can’t quite reach 60 FPS. However, when we turn on DLSS 3 Frame Generation performance increases by another 60% and is now 80 FPS, and playable, smoothness has been improved. The total improvement with DLSS+Frame Gen is 186% increase. We can definitely see that upping image quality settings, like Ray Tracing, allows DLSS and Frame Gen to provide a greater uplift to performance.