A couple of days ago, Remedy shared the official PC system requirements for Alan Wake 2. Compared to other upcoming triple-A games, these PC specs appear to be quite high. After all, Remedy recommends an NVIDIA RTX2060 for its Low Settings. However, it appears there is a reason why the team has not listed any of the NVIDIA 10 and AMD 5000 series GPUs.
According to Remedy’s Lea-Newin, Alan Wake 2 will require graphics cards that support mesh shaders. And, as you may have guessed, both the NVIDIA 10 and AMD 5000 series do not support Mesh Shaders at all.
In short, Alan Wake 2 will be one of the first games that will take full advantage of DX12 Ultimate.
Ironically, a lot of PC gamers have been wondering when they’d see a game that supports Mesh Shaders. And now that a game requires them, the exact same people are crucifying Remedy.
For what it’s worth, Remedy has been constantly pushing the graphical boundaries of PC games. Remember Quantum Break? That game came out in 2016, and it took it four years until it was playable at 4K. CONTROL was also one of the best-looking games of its time. And now Alan Wake 2 will have Path Tracing effects.
Again, it’s really funny witnessing PC gamers constantly asking for a new “Crysis” game. And when a “Crysis” game does appear on the horizon, those same folks start calling it an “unoptimized mess”. Here is a fun fact. Crysis WAS unoptimized when it came out (due to its awful CPU utilization as it was single-threaded).
The same also happens with most UE5 games that use Nanite and Lumen. Nanite is a game-changer and does not have a big performance hit. People mistakenly believe that Nanite is a resource hog. It’s not. On the other hand, Lumen can be really taxing. What people fail to understand is that Lumen is actually a form of ray tracing. So of course and it will be demanding.
Anyway, Remedy will release Alan Wake 2 on October 27th!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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