Radeon RX 7000 Series – LOW Ray Tracing Preset
Now that we know the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs take such a big hit with enabling Path Tracing in Alan Wake 2, we wanted to re-evaluate their performance but this time using the “Low” Ray Tracing quality preset mode. This means that Path Tracing will not be enabled now, but also this is the lowest quality Ray Tracing option also, so Ray Tracing quality will be lower than “High” and so therefore we will only show the Radeon RX 7000 series performance on this graph and see if any GPU is playable with “Low” Ray Tracing. We will also include upscaling using FSR 2 on the graph too, to see how that plays a role in making something playable.
4K
Well, even by enabling “Low” Ray Tracing the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is still not playable at 4K even with upscaling, only hitting maybe 50 FPS. You can, however, see the huge difference between “High” Ray Tracing and “Low” Ray Tracing on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Enabling “High” Ray Tracing which enables Path Tracing takes a 50% hit in performance compared to “Low” Ray Tracing without Path Tracing.
1440p
Ok, things look a lot better for the AMD Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs at 1440p when using the “Low” Ray Tracing preset in Alan Wake 2, instead of “High.” Of course, it is the lowest Ray Tracing quality, and it does not have Path Tracing enabled, but at least the Radeon RX 7900 XTX is now playable at 1440p with FSR 2 enabled.
Yeah, it still takes upscaling really even at 1440p to bring the Radeon RX 7900 XTX up to levels above 60 FPS. Without upscaling, you can hit about 53 FPS with it, and that honestly is sort of acceptable in this game. The Radeon RX 7900 XT is also playable with upscaling, but it does require that FSR 2 at 1440p to be playable, and again, this is all at a display resolution of 1440p here, not 4K. The Radeon RX 7800 XT with upscaling is also playable, barely, but cards below that are not.
1080p
We did find that the AMD Radeon RX 7700 XT could be playable in Alan Wake 2 at 1080p using FSR 2 upscaling on the “Low” Ray Tracing Preset. Otherwise, that’s about it, the Radeon RX 7600 has no chance of using Ray Tracing.
Discussion (3 replies)
Join Discussion →Nice review I love to see the just bring all your cards knock down drag out sort of review. :) Even if the card I bought isn't dominating the charts. It falls in line with what I spent! ;)
Thanks for the write up! I got lucky and had a code for this game with my new laptop. Ironically I haven't had a chance to play it on it yet but I did fire it up on the 4090/OLED rig last night and yeah, it's beautiful. I don't know when I'll get around to playing this but I'm looking forward to it.
I've been playing this on the laptop, 4080 SUPER, and 4090 for the last few weeks and have very much enjoyed the visuals. The laptop at 2500x1600, and 4080 SUPER at 4K, perform very similarly with max settings but also using DLSS w/ framegen. The lag is noticeable with framegen but otherwise I'd say it is very well implemented.
The best experience is, of course, with the 4090 at 4K. There are moments I can turn off frame gen for 60+ FPS but I've left it on for the mostly 90-115+ FPS.
Visually speaking, I've really enjoyed the look of this game as I did briefly live in the backwoods of the Northwest (Aberdeen WA in the mid 80s, which looked a lot like most of this game). HDR is also well used.
I've enjoyed it the most out of the various Wake/Control franchise games I've played but it's getting a bit depressing and I've got enough things to bring me down these days so I'm going to drop it and switch over to something else, probably Baldurs Gate 3 since I could use a decent fantasy RPG to get lost into for a bit.