The highly-anticipated Alan Wake 2 launches this week, and looks stunning with breathtaking, fully ray-traced graphics which are accelerated and enhanced by NVIDIA DLSS 3.5’s complete suite of AI-powered technologies.
GeForce RTX 40 Series gamers will receive the definitive day-one experience: frame rates are multiplied by an average of 4.5X at 4K, ray tracing is even more immersive thanks to NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction, and NVIDIA Reflex makes gameplay even more responsive.
Additionally, Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure, and Shadows of Doubt, two highly rated indie games, also receive DLSS performance upgrades today.
The Return of Alan Wake!
Remedy Entertainment’s eagerly awaited Alan Wake 2, published by Epic Games, arrives October 27th with jaw-dropping fully ray-traced graphics, enhanced and accelerated by DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction. Players will explore two beautiful yet terrifying worlds, boasting the most advanced visuals seen to date in gaming, searching for the source of a supernatural darkness that has trapped Alan in an endless nightmare.
Alan Wake 2’s fully ray-traced, path-traced visuals take the game’s ray-traced lighting, reflections and shadows to the next level, unifying them in a single solution that produces incredible results, as seen in this new, exclusive Alan Wake 2 RTX launch video.
Alan Wake 2 Gets Up to 4.5X Faster with a DLSS Performance Upgrade
Activating ray tracing and DLSS in Alan Wake 2 on a GeForce RTX GPU automatically enables Ray Reconstruction, replacing two denoisers with a unified AI model that enhances the quality of ray tracing, making gameplay more immersive, and graphics more realistic. In addition, Ray Reconstruction runs up to 14% faster in our benchmarks, further accelerating performance for GeForce RTX gamers.
“The new Ray Reconstruction feature in DLSS 3.5 renders our fully ray-traced world more beautifully than ever before, bringing you deeper into the story of Alan Wake 2,” said Tatu Aalto, Lead Graphics Programmer Remedy Entertainment.
The combination of NVIDIA technology gives NVIDIA GeForce RTX Gamers the ultimate Alan Wake 2 experience, with beautiful graphics and a remarkable performance uplift. Here are a few examples:
- At 4K, with every setting maxed and full ray tracing enabled, activating Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction and Super Resolution sees frame rates multiply astronomically. On the GeForce RTX 4090, performance multiplies by 4.1X, enabling owners to play Alan Wake 2 at its very best at over 120 FPS at 4K! The GeForce RTX 4080 sees its performance multiplied by 4.7X, and the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti multiplies performance by 4.7X, for max setting 4K gameplay at nearly 80 FPS
- At 1440p, GeForce RTX 40 Series frame rates multiply by an average of 3X with full ray tracing and every other setting maxed out, enabling 80 FPS+ gameplay on the GeForce RTX 4070 and above
- At 1080p, the most popular gaming resolution, performance multiplies by 2.7X on average, enabling owners of faster cards to play at up to 190 FPS
The Fully Ray Traced World of Alan Wake 2
Full ray tracing, also known as path tracing, accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene. It is used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that are indistinguishable from reality, but until the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores, and the AI-powered acceleration of NVIDIA DLSS 3.5, real-time video game full ray tracing was impossible.
In Alan Wake 2, RT High and RT Medium settings use path tracing. For full details, the following table shows which settings utilise path tracing, and what ray-traced features are available when enabling each preset.
| 🗩 | Note: For best performance, ensure that DLSS Ray Reconstruction is enabled. |
| Ray Tracing Presets | Low | Medium | High | ||
| Path Tracing In Use | None | Partial (1 bounce, RT AO on last hit) | Full (3 bounces, RT AO on last hit) | ||
| Path Traced Indirect Lighting Quality | OFF | MEDIUM | HIGH | ||
| Ray Traced Direct Lighting | ON | ON | ON | ||
| Ray Traced Transparency | LOW | HIGH | HIGH | ||
If DLSS Ray Reconstruction is disabled or not available, the following fallbacks will apply:
| NRD Direct Lighting Denoising Quality | LOW | HIGH | HIGH | ||
| NRD Indirect Lighting Denoising Quality | N/A | MEDIUM | HIGH | ||
Alan Wake 2 Game Ready Drivers, Bundle and Cloud Gameplay
Look for the NVIDIA Game Ready Driver for Alan Wake 2 out today.
Buyers of eligible GeForce RTX 4070, 4070 Ti, 4080 and 4090 graphics cards and desktop PCs, or a laptop with a GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, RTX 4080 Laptop GPU, or RTX 4070 Laptop GPU from select retailers and etailers will receive a digital copy of the game, to play when released on October 27th. To see the complete list of participating partners in your country, head to the Alan Wake 2 bundle homepage.
Play Alan Wake 2 in the Cloud on GeForce NOW.
Other new DLSS games this week include Ikonei Island: An Earthlock Adventure and Shadows of Doubt which updates today with a DLSS 2 Performance Upgrade.
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