GPU Comparison – HIGH Quality Preset – HIGH Ray Tracing Preset
On the previous two pages, we did not have ray tracing enabled, we were testing plain rasterized performance. Now it is time to engage the Ray Tracing mode, turn it on, and see how performance compares. Therefore, on this page we are using the same settings as the last two pages except now we are turning on the “High” Ray Tracing Preset in the game, but with no upscaling, no DLSS or FSR 2 here, this is Native Resolution.
Remember, in this game, when you enable the “High” Ray Tracing Preset it enables the Path Tracing mode and turns everything up to the highest levels. That means at the “High” Ray Tracing Preset the Path Traced Indirect Lighting is also on the “High” quality setting, so that means Ray Tracing is maxed out on these tests at the absolute highest possible level in the game. On NVIDIA GPUs Ray Reconstruction is used, but on AMD GPUs they don’t have this feature so just the default game denoiser is used, but these are the DEFAULT settings you get in this game with these settings with each video card shown below. The graphs are sorted from fastest to slowest, NVIDIA is in green, AMD is in red, let’s go.
4K
Now, turning on the “High” Ray Tracing Preset was so detrimental to performance at 4K without upscaling, that we could only test it on a few video cards, the rest were too slow to test as you can see. The GeForce RTX 4090 may be the fastest card, but it cannot play Alan Wake 2 at 4K with “High” Ray Tracing preset at all without upscaling, period. At 41 FPS the game is not playable. Performance-wise, it is 46% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 and 173% faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The GeForce RTX 4080 only hits below 30 FPS, and the RTX 4070 Ti at 21 FPS, so there was no need to test below that.
The AMD GPUs really struggle with the “High” Ray Tracing preset in Alan Wake 2, and that is down to the Path Tracing option being enabled at the “High” setting as you will see later on in this review. At 15 FPS the Radeon RX 7900 XTX speaks for itself.
1440p
Running Alan Wake 2 at 1440p you can run with “High” Ray Tracing on the GeForce RTX 4090 without needing upscaling, it hits 74 FPS average and is very smooth and enjoyable. However, it is the only video card at these settings that is playable without upscaling. The GeForce RTX 4090 is 37% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 and the RTX 4080 isn’t the smoothest at these settings. The RTX 4070 Ti and below are certainly not playable.
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX does a bit better at 1440p, it can at least hit 30 FPS, but that isn’t playable, and every card below it is also not playable. Performance was too slow to test the Radeon RX 7600. With Path Tracing enabled the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is only as fast as the GeForce RTX 4070.
1080p
Dropping down to 1080p makes things a lot better for a lot of cards here, without upscaling. We can actually play the game on the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and GeForce RTX 4080 smoothly at 1080p with “High” Ray Tracing sans upscaling. The GeForce RTX 4070 is iffy, but below that everything is too sluggish to enjoy. The GeForce RTX 4090 is 32% faster than the GeForce RTX 4080 and the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is slower than the GeForce RTX 4070, again due to path tracing. Let’s see what upscaling can do for performance on the next page.