Friday, October 27th 2023
PSA: Alan Wake II Runs on Older GPUs, Mesh Shaders not Required
"Alan Wake II," released earlier this week, is the latest third person action adventure loaded with psychological thriller elements that call back to some of the best works of Remedy Entertainment, including "Control," "Max Payne 2," and "Alan Wake." It's also a visual feast as our performance review of the game should show you, leveraging the full spectrum of the DirectX 12 Ultimate feature-set. In the run up to the release, when Remedy put out the system requirements lists for "Alan Wake II" with clear segregation for experiences with ray tracing and without; what wasn't clear was just how much the game depended on hardware support for mesh shaders, which is why its bare minimum list called for at least an NVIDIA RTX 2060 "Turing," or at least an AMD RX 6600 XT RDNA2, both of which are DirectX 12 Ultimate GPUs with hardware mesh shaders support.
There was some confusion among gaming online forums over the requirement for hardware mesh shaders. Many people assumed that the game will not work on GPUs without mesh shader support, locking out lots of gamers. Through the course of our testing for our performance review, we learned that while it is true that "Alan Wake II" relies on hardware support for mesh shaders, the lack of this does not break gameplay. You will, however, pay a heavy performance penalty on GPUs that lack hardware mesh shader support. On such GPUs, the game is designed to show users a warning dialog box that their GPU lacks mesh shader support (screenshot below), but you can choose to ignore this warning, and go ahead to play the game. The game considers mesh shaders a "recommended GPU feature," and not a requirement. Without mesh shaders, you can expect a severe performance loss that is best illustrated with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT based on the RDNA architecture, which lacks hardware mesh shaders.
In our testing, at 1080p, without upscaling, the RX 5700 XT performs worse than the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. In most other raster-only titles, the RX 5700 XT with the latest AMD drivers, is known to perform about as fast as an RTX 2080. Here it's seen lagging behind the GTX 1660 Ti. It's important to note here, that the GTX 16-series "Turing," while lacking in RT cores and tensor cores from its RTX 20-series cousin, does feature hardware support for mesh shaders, and is hence able to perform along expected lines. We have included a projection for how the RX 5700 XT fares typically in our testing—it ends up roughly around the performance region of the RTX 3060 and RX 6600 XT. AMD's Radeon RX 6000 series RDNA2 and current RX 7000 series RDNA3 fully support hardware mesh shaders across all GPU models.
That doesn't mean that RX 5700 XT delivers unplayable results. 1080p at 60 FPS is in reach with lowest settings, or at close to maximum settings with FSR Quality, which is not such a terrible tradeoff, just you still need to make compromises. We didn't spot any rendering errors or crashes.
Once we knew that RX 5700 XT works, we also wanted to test the NVIDIA side of things. Using the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti "Pascal" , the flagship GPU from that generation, we were greeted with the same warning dialog as the RX 5700 XT—that the GPU is missing support for mesh shaders. Not only does the GTX 1080 Ti vastly underperform, but it yields far worse performance than the RX 5700 XT, nearly 2-3rds. At launch, the RX 5700 XT was a little bit slower than the GTX 1080 Ti in our reviews of the time, but has climbed since, and is now a tiny bit faster. Since the card lacks DLSS support, using FSR is the only option, but even that can't save the card. Running at 1080p lowest with FSR 2 Ultra Performance yielded only 27 FPS.
There was some confusion among gaming online forums over the requirement for hardware mesh shaders. Many people assumed that the game will not work on GPUs without mesh shader support, locking out lots of gamers. Through the course of our testing for our performance review, we learned that while it is true that "Alan Wake II" relies on hardware support for mesh shaders, the lack of this does not break gameplay. You will, however, pay a heavy performance penalty on GPUs that lack hardware mesh shader support. On such GPUs, the game is designed to show users a warning dialog box that their GPU lacks mesh shader support (screenshot below), but you can choose to ignore this warning, and go ahead to play the game. The game considers mesh shaders a "recommended GPU feature," and not a requirement. Without mesh shaders, you can expect a severe performance loss that is best illustrated with the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT based on the RDNA architecture, which lacks hardware mesh shaders.
That doesn't mean that RX 5700 XT delivers unplayable results. 1080p at 60 FPS is in reach with lowest settings, or at close to maximum settings with FSR Quality, which is not such a terrible tradeoff, just you still need to make compromises. We didn't spot any rendering errors or crashes.
Once we knew that RX 5700 XT works, we also wanted to test the NVIDIA side of things. Using the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti "Pascal" , the flagship GPU from that generation, we were greeted with the same warning dialog as the RX 5700 XT—that the GPU is missing support for mesh shaders. Not only does the GTX 1080 Ti vastly underperform, but it yields far worse performance than the RX 5700 XT, nearly 2-3rds. At launch, the RX 5700 XT was a little bit slower than the GTX 1080 Ti in our reviews of the time, but has climbed since, and is now a tiny bit faster. Since the card lacks DLSS support, using FSR is the only option, but even that can't save the card. Running at 1080p lowest with FSR 2 Ultra Performance yielded only 27 FPS.
100 Comments on PSA: Alan Wake II Runs on Older GPUs, Mesh Shaders not Required
Seriously, the video card companies are hand-in-hand with those callous game devs, so they can sucker in the plebs on buying always the latest and most powerful GPU.
Just like on mobile phones...
Disgusting.
Just let it go.
Edit: The game does look mighty impressive, even on low rendering settings.
The graphical bar has been raised. I hope the gameplay is actually fun.
Sure, they were cheaper, but instead of paying $200 every year, now we pay $5-800 every 5 years. Pascal was awesome, and the 1080 (Ti) had a long and prosperous life, but sometimes, we have to move on.
1. Turn down their settings from "High", and customize/optimize better.
2. Drop to a lower resolution(yes 720p is perfectly playable AND enjoyable).
A side note, Remedy needs to stop with the silly warnings.
Adding more polygons gets diminishing returns pretty quickly. Good art direction is definitely more impactful than brute forcing detail.
The same cohort of people who refuse to understand this will continue to complain, of course. But we cannot do anything about those who choose - despite having access to the entirety of human knowledge via the internet - to be uneducated.
By the news team on sites like this reporting the 5700 Xt couldn't play it at all.
Journalism usually involves a degree of fact checking.
Yet were here.
"Gamer's are confused". So are journalists.
Nowadays node shrinks are barely an improvement and hideously expensive to boot, rasterisation has been optimised to the Nth degree so there's almost no room for improvement via that avenue, and we've only barely started down the far more complex ray- and path-tracing road, where optimisations are hindered by the slow down in node shrinking.
Are you gluttons for punishment?