Remedy finally released the PC system requirements for Alan Wake 2 last Friday and they are pretty high. This is not much of a surprise, considering that the Finnish studio always pushed technologies further with each new game.
Let's go through the official specifications again.
| MINIMUM | RECOMMENDED | ULTRA | RAY TRACING LOW | RAY TRACING MEDIUM | RAY TRACING HIGH | |
| GRAPHICS PRESET | Low | Medium | High | Medium Ray tracing low | Medium Ray tracing medium Path tracing on | High Ray tracing high Path tracing on |
| RESOLUTION | 1080p | 1440p/1080p | 2160p | 1080p | 1080p | 2160p |
| FPS | 30 | 30/60 | 60 | 30 | 60 | 60 |
| GPU | GeForce RTX 2060 - Radeon RX 6600 | GeForce RTX 3060/ GeForce RTX 3070 Radeon RX 6600 XT/ Radeon RX 6700 XT | GeForce RTX 4070 Radeon RX 7800 XT | GeForce RTX 3070 Radeon RX 6800 XT | GeForce RTX 4070 | GeForce RTX 4080 |
| VRAM | 6 GB | 8 GB | 12 GB | 8 GB | 12 GB | 16 GB |
| DLSS / FSR2 | Quality | Balanced/Performance | Performance | Quality | Quality | Performance |
| CPU | Intel i5-7600K or AMD equivalent | Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel equivalent | Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel equivalent | Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel equivalent | Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel equivalent | Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel equivalent |
| RAM | 16 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB |
| OS | Windows 10/11 64-bit | Windows 10/11 64-bit | Windows 10/11 64-bit | Windows 10/11 64-bit | Windows 10/11 64-bit | Windows 10/11 64-bit |
| STORAGE | 90 GB SSD | 90 GB SSD | 90 GB SSD | 90 GB SSD | 90 GB SSD | 90 GB SSD |
As you can see, neither NVIDIA's GTX 10 Series nor AMD's Radeon RX 5000 Series are supported. If you're wondering why, Remedy's Lea-Newin revealed that it's because those graphics cards do not feature hardware support for Mesh Shaders.
The original tweet was deleted, but DSO Gaming captured a snapshot. Moreover, the Remedy developer subsequently said a talk or blog post about the Mesh Shaders implementation in Alan Wake 2 could be on the way.
You could be easily forgiven if you thought this technology was new, given how little time it's been in the spotlight. However, NVIDIA first demonstrated Mesh Shading with the Asteroids demo released in December 2018. Mesh Shading aimed to reinvent the geometry pipeline by bringing the benefits of the compute programming model to the graphics pipeline's front end. Thanks to advanced culling and pre-culling, it can also improve performance and/or allow much higher levels of geometry. Mesh Shading was subsequently added to Microsoft's DirectX12 Ultimate. The first NVIDIA driver certified for Mesh Shading (and other DX12 Ultimate features) rolled out in April 2020.
Unfortunately, the only game to introduce support for this new tech was NetEase's Justice MMO, where the developers pushed 1.8 billion triangles at 4K@60FPS on a mere RTX 3060Ti GPU. At that time, NetEase called Mesh Shading the future of mainstream games, but that prediction didn't truly materialize until Alan Wake 2.
It would be interesting to learn exactly what kind of benefits Remedy has extracted by Mesh Shaders for Alan Wake 2. We'll try to uncover more information about this implementation post-launch. As a reminder, the game is due on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X next Friday.
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