Nvidia reveals official Alan Wake 2 benchmarks but it’ll still be brutal on older GPUs

Nvidia has revealed several performance benchmarks for Alan Wake 2 on PC, showcasing just how many frames you can expect to render in the technically demanding title.

Once every three to five years, a game comes out that really pushes PC gaming hardware. From Crysis to The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, the legacy of the “system-killer” still looms tall. With Cyberpunk 2077 being the last game to really challenge boundaries, Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 raised some eyebrows for its incredibly high system requirements.

But, do high system requirements mean that the game is badly optimized? No. Alan Wake 2 is one of the few AAA titles that is not cross-generation, meaning that it does not have to target older hardware, and instead leverage more advanced rendering and lighting techniques.

Sporting features such as path tracing, ray reconstruction, and DLSS 3, the title looks to push the limits of current PC hardware, and that includes the RTX 4090. Nvidia has detailed all of the snazzy new technology on its blog.

Benchmarks reveal brutal performance without frame generation

Nvidia’s RTX 4070 manages to render Alan Wake 2, with all of its various RT bells and whistles turned on without frame generation at 44 FPS at 1080p, meaning that you should expect slightly slower performance from an RTX 3080. So, those using older graphics cards might not be able to run the latest and greatest lighting effects such as path tracing at a stable framerate.

Luckily, Nvidia has also suggested settings for users of older RTX cards to turn down, in order to stabilize performance. The company has also announced that there will be a game-ready driver ready to download on October 26.

While many have decried Alan Wake 2’s system requirements, it’s also genuinely exciting to see a developer using the latest and greatest technology to its full potential, even if that means that the title will run slower than you might expect in native rendering scenarios. Many RTX 40-series cards, like the RTX 4070 look like they perform well across a number of resolutions listed. But, remember to take official benchmarks with a pinch of salt. We’re eagerly awaiting to hear how the game will run on PCs, and will also run our own independent benchmarks.