'Alan Wake 2' Benchmarks Show RTX 4090 Hitting 130+ FPS at 4K With Maxed Out Ray Tracing

Alan Wake 2
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia released a blog post covering all of the new ray tracing graphical features that will be coming to Remedy's Alan Wake 2 arriving on October 26th, including integration of DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction. In the post, Nvidia also shared benchmarks of the game running on its RTX 40 series GPUs at 4K, 1440p, and 1080p, with the RTX 4090 hitting well into triple digit frames at 4K maximum settings.

At 4K at maximum settings with the Full Ray Tracing Preset, Nvidia showed benchmarks of the RTX 4090, 4080, and 4070 Ti with DLSS 3.5 enabled and disabled (note the 3.5 designation). The RTX 4090 with DLSS 3.5 was able to achieve 134.4 frames per second, 4080 103.9 fps, and the RTX 4070 Ti 82.2 fps. With DLSS disabled, Nvidia's benchmarks reveal that frame rates plummet to just 32.8 fps on the RTX 4090, 22.2 fps on the RTX 4080, and 17.4 fps on the 4070 Ti.

At 1440p with the same graphical settings, the RTX 4090 was able to pump out 170.1 fps, 4080 133.1 fps, 4070 Ti 108.3 fps, and 4070 91.9 fps with DLSS 3.5 enabled. Without Nvidia's performance-enhancing tech enabled, frame rates plummeted to 62.7 fps on the RTX 4090, 44.6 fps on the 4080, 35.3 fps on the 4070 Ti, and 28 fps on the 4070.

The 1080p results were very similar to the 1440p results in that the RTX 4090 all the way down to the RTX 4060 yielded substantially greater frames with DLSS 3.5 enabled. For the full rundown of frame rates, be sure to check out Nvidia's blog post for more details.

Sadly, Nvidia did not provide any performance benchmarks without ray tracing, but they do give us a good idea of how the game will run, at least on Nvidia's latest GPUs. The biggest takeaway is that DLSS 3.5 is offering massive improvements to frame rate (of up to 4.1x), noticeably more than previous games, and there's a reason for that. Nvidia revealed that not only is DLSS Frame Generation improving performance, but DLSS Ray Reconstruction is also providing surprisingly good performance improvements too, enabling a 14% performance improvement all by itself. (As a reminder DLSS 3.5 incorporates DLSS upscaling, frame generation, and Ray Reconstruction all together as one package.)

Ray Tracing

Nvidia also highlighted the key graphical features coming to Alan Wake 2, particularly in the Ray Tracing department. Ray-traced lighting (including ambient occlusion), reflections, and shadows will all be featured in the game, including the usage of path tracing with most "ray tracing effects" to optimize the game's performance.

According to Nvidia, Alan Wake 2 will be one of the most realistic-looking ray-tracing games available as it will feature a full-blown ray tracing/path tracing quality mode that will render all lights with light simulation, similar to Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive mode (and Portal/Portal Prelude RTX). 

There will be three Ray Tracing presets to choose from, including low, medium, and high settings. each of these settings will affect the number of light bounces the game will render, the quality of indirect path-traced lighting, the quality of ray-traced direct lighting, and the quality of ray-traced transparent materials. On top of this, the three quality presets also affect direct and indirect lighting denoising quality for gamers who can't take advantage of Ray Reconstruction (i.e. AMD and Intel GPU users.).

Alan Wake 2 drops in just two days on October 26th. Nvidia has confirmed it will be launching a Game Ready Driver for the game on the day it launches, after 6 a.m. PT. For Intel gamers, Intel has already released a new driver update with support for Alan Wake 2 as well, leaving AMD as the only GPU manufacturer of the three without an Alan Wake 2 driver, at least for now.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • tamalero
    When they say "with DLSS 3.5" I assume they are using framegen right?
    Reply
  • kyuuketsuki
    tamalero said:
    When they say "with DLSS 3.5" I assume they are using framegen right?
    Definitely. I hate that all DLSS features are getting lumped together, so we only get numbers with everything or without anything. Frame generation, in particular, needs to be broken out. It's almost certain you can get playable frames just using upscaling without relying on frame gen.
    Reply
  • elforeign
    1440P 3080 12GB hoping for 40-60 fps with DLSS/3.5 - Will wait for game reviews before trying it out, but looks promising.
    Reply
  • Order 66
    The game is still an unoptimized mess if it has to use DLSS and frame generation to be at to hit more than 60 fps at 4k on a 4090. The 4090 should be able to hit 60+ fps at 4k native.
    Reply
  • txfeinbergs
    Order 66 said:
    The game is still an unoptimized mess if it has to use DLSS and frame generation to be at to hit more than 60 fps at 4k on a 4090. The 4090 should be able to hit 60+ fps at 4k native.

    You have no basis to make that claim. Just because a game is state of the art and requires a lot of resources does not make it an "unoptimized mess".
    Reply
  • Order 66
    txfeinbergs said:
    You have no basis to make that claim. Just because a game is state of the art and requires a lot of resources does not make it an "unoptimized mess".
    Actually, I have a lot of basis to make that claim. It has been an ongoing trend for games to require upscaling even at 1080p, if a game requires upscaling to be playable, I don't consider it state of the art. For example, Forza Horizon 5 has been regarded as one of the most well-optimized games in recent years, but it has fairly good graphics. Also if a game can't be played on popular GPUs that people can actually afford, is the game really worth playing?
    Reply
  • txfeinbergs
    Order 66 said:
    Actually, I have a lot of basis to make that claim. It has been an ongoing trend for games to require upscaling even at 1080p, if a game requires upscaling to be playable, I don't consider it state of the art. For example, Forza Horizon 5 has been regarded as one of the most well-optimized games in recent years, but it has fairly good graphics. Also if a game can't be played on popular GPUs that people can actually afford, is the game really worth playing?
    Was Crysis an unoptimized mess, or ahead of its time? Would upscaling have helped out many people run the game had it existed back then for Crysis? Once again, just because a game has SW that outpaces HW does not an unoptimized mess make. As far as affordability, that has nothing to do with whether a game is optimized or not. That has to do with your income and what you can afford.
    Reply
  • Order 66
    txfeinbergs said:
    Was Crysis an unoptimized mess, or ahead of its time? Would upscaling have helped out many people run the game had it existed back then for Crysis? Once again, just because a game has SW that outpaces HW does not an unoptimized mess make. As far as affordability, that has nothing to do with whether a game is optimized or not. That has to do with your income and what you can afford.
    Crysis was both, it misjudged the direction that CPUs were going in (more cores not more clock speed), but it was also ahead of its time in the graphics department. People shouldn't have to have another job or make more money than they already do to be able to afford powerful enough hardware to play the latest games. If you still don't understand why affordability matters, then remember the PS3 launch, when sony said that people might have to work a second job to afford the console. This statement was met with a furious wave of boo's. Also, it would make sense to make a game that people can actually play with current hardware otherwise you probably won't sell many copies of your game (unless your game becomes a meme like Crysis did).
    Reply
  • ManDaddio
    The 4090 is still a 4K beast. It will still beat anything out there with full Ray tracing enabled.
    Unless, of course, it's an AMD partnership game. Can anyone say sabotage? Lol. Don't get your panties wet now.
    But on a different note I won't be buying it on release because it's on the epic store only. And after a while I'm just going to forget about it.
    I don't really understand the epic exclusives. I don't see how that really helps out game studios. Except fast cash. F-consumers right?
    If I do happen to remember it exists down the road I'm going to end up buying it on super sale because that's how important it will be by then.
    And I would love to experience all the bells and whistles now since I have a 4090.
    I guess my money goes to someone else.

    Epic 💩
    Reply
  • tamalero
    txfeinbergs said:
    Was Crysis an unoptimized mess, or ahead of its time? Would upscaling have helped out many people run the game had it existed back then for Crysis? Once again, just because a game has SW that outpaces HW does not an unoptimized mess make. As far as affordability, that has nothing to do with whether a game is optimized or not. That has to do with your income and what you can afford.
    crysis was nowhere as good in quality and was even worse compared to what they promised.
    hence why it became a meme or just benchmark material.

    So no.. not something of "ahead of its time".

    I'd say CONTROL Was the best state of the art with all the features. And yet you could somewhat run decently even on a 2070 with some RT features enabled.
    If a game can't even run on the "titan" class position of cards at native. Your game is <Mod Edit>.

    ManDaddio said:
    The 4090 is still a 4K beast. It will still beat anything out there with full Ray tracing enabled.
    Unless, of course, it's an AMD partnership game. Can anyone say sabotage? Lol. Don't get your panties wet now.
    But on a different note I won't be buying it on release because it's on the epic store only. And after a while I'm just going to forget about it.
    I don't really understand the epic exclusives. I don't see how that really helps out game studios. Except fast cash. F-consumers right?
    If I do happen to remember it exists down the road I'm going to end up buying it on super sale because that's how important it will be by then.
    And I would love to experience all the bells and whistles now since I have a 4090.
    I guess my money goes to someone else.

    Epic 💩


    The tech sabotage goes both way, Like Nvidia blocking hardware PhysX or multi vendor crossfire/sli

    Anyone remembers when Nvidia blocked AMD easy to do features on Batman?
    And changing your videocard ID could make any AMD card run it fine with all effects?
    Reply