Nvidia dives deep into Alan Wake’s Ray Tracing and DLSS support on PC
Nvidia shares a technology overview of Alan Wake 2’s ray tracing
Like Control before it, Remedy’s Alan Wake 2 will be a major ray tracing showcase when it launches on PC later this week. The game will also be a showcase of Nvidia’s RTX technologies, with the game supporting both path tracing and DLSS 3.5 at launch.
What does this mean for PC gamers? It means that Alan Wake II will be a visually stunning game on PC, especially for users of top of the line PC hardware. While the game will be playable without ray tracing, users of modern GPUs will be able to utilise cutting-edge graphical effects like path traced lighting, ray traced transparency effects, and more.
Right now, Nvidia are bundling their high-end RTX graphics cards with free copies of Alan Wake 2. Nvidia knows that this game will showcase the benefits of the company’s RTX technologies, and they want all PC gamers to see Alan Wake’s strong visuals.
Alan Wake 2 has Full Ray Tracing Support
At launch, Alan Wake 2’s PC version will have three ray tracing presets. These presets are Low, Medium, and High. The game’s low ray tracing preset will enable ray traced lighting and set ray traced transparency to low. At medium, partial path tracing is enabled with one light bounce and RTAO. Path traced indirecty lighting is set to Medium quality, and ray traced transparency is set to high.
At high ray tracing settings, Alan Wake 2 has full path tracing that takes into account three light bounces. This creates more accurate lighting and realistic visuals. With so many light bounces, this RT mode is a lot more taxing than the game’s other ray tracing modes. Expect this level of ray tracing to require upscaling techniques like DLSS to be performant, even on high-end GPUs.
DLSS Ray Reconstruction
Alan Wake 2’s PC version supports Nvidia’s DLSS 3.5 technology. This means that the game features DLSS Super Resolution, DLAA, DLSS Frame Generation, and DLSS Ray Reconstruction on supported hardware.
With DLSS Ray Reconstruction, Nvidia claims to be able to boost both the performance and image quality of Alan Wake 2 by replacing two denoising techniques with a single AI-powered neural denoiser.
Nvidia used one of their supercomputers to train an AI network for DLSS Ray Reconstruction. Using this AI denoiser, RTX GPUs can make smarter decisions using available ray tracing data. This allows Nvidia to generate more accurate ray tracing effects, higher quality reflections, and retain more high frequency information for upscaling. By replacing multiple denoisers, DLSS Ray Reconstruction can also have performance benefits.
The table below showcases Alan Wake 2’s stock denoisers when used with the game’s Low, Medium, and high ray tracing presets.
Alan Wake 2 is launching on PC on October 27th on the Epic Games Store.
You can join the discussion on Alan Wake 2’s use of ray tracing and DLSS on the OC3D Forums.
