Now that Alan Wake 2 is out, we’re seeing a lot of discussion over how the game runs, given the high bar it sets for your gaming hardware. We’re now seeing that Alan Wake 2 can run on older, unsupported GPUs, just, don’t expect it to be more than a very pretty slideshow.
We’ve already tested the best Alan Wake 2 settings for performance and found that our testing rigs just about got acceptable results despite housing an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070. This may not be one of the best graphics cards on the market anymore, but it more than cleared the Alan Wake 2 system requirements.
Daniel Owen has taken to his YouTube channel to run his own testing with much stronger hardware, however, before the real testing began, he ran a short test on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070. Yes, you read that right, a GTX 1070.
Before the game booted, it warned that the GPU being used was missing a key feature – mesh shaders – and the game would be unlikely to run as expected. Pushing past this warning, the game starts and you can play, just at 20 fps on the low global preset. Surprisingly, upon bumping the global settings to High, the game continues to push through, dropping further frames but still looking fine visually, as long as you’re not moving.
Granted, this was running at a native 1080p resolution with no DLSS, as the GTX series doesn’t support it, but when enabling FSR 2 and dropping the render resolution to 720p, performance does bump fps into the mid-20s, but with little stability. Going even further with the render resolution to 540p actually sees a drop back down to the high teens.
Ultimately it’s great to know that Alan Wake 2 hasn’t been completely locked away from users with older GPUs, just don’t expect to be able to get any acceptable performance out of them.
Check out our Alan Wake 2 review to see what we thought of the game, and you can also browse the best horror games on PC to get yourself in the right frame of mind.