The sequel to Alan Wake, Alan Wake 2, has finally landed, and with it comes some of the most impressive visual technologies and graphics that we have seen to date thanks to Path Tracing which is complemented through the use of NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction technology.

Witness Alan's Nightmare In All Its Path Traced Glory In Alan Wake 2! Insane Visual Fidelity But Also Super Taxing To Run On High-End GPUs

Alan Wake 2 is the second title to feature support for NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction tech which further pushes the image quality by delivering enhanced ray tracing quality. Alan Wake 2 also is the first fully blown-out AAA experience to leverage Path Tracing tech which offers photo-realistic environments. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first game to do it all and Remedy is following CDProjektRed's footsteps to take PC gaming the superior platform in terms of graphics fidelity.

Do read our full review of Alan Wake 2 here!

The Visual Options For PC

Alan Wake 2 comes with a host of settings to tune from including some PC-exclusive options such as the different Ray Tracing / Path Tracing presets to select from and multiple upscaling modes to use.

The game offers the standard display settings which let you adjust:

Display Mode (Windows, Borderless, Fullscreen)Display ResolutionRender ResolutionResolution UpscalingDLSS Frame GenerationVsyncBrightness Calibration

2 of 9

It should be mentioned that the game includes both NVIDIA DLSS 3 and AMD FSR 2 technologies. Frame Generation is only supported with NVIDIA's DLSS and so is Ray Reconstruction. AMD FSR 2 users don't get Frame-Gen support. One interesting thing is that there's no true native mode with DLSS upscaling as the native mode sets the game to use DLAA which is DLSS at native resolution & which can become a bit more taxing on your PC. Meanwhile, AMD's FSR does offer a native mode.

2 of 9

Then there are the two visual effects that we had disabled for our tests but include Motion Blur and Film Grain. The game comes with four quality presets which include Low, Medium, High & Custom. The custom settings can be adjusted up to Ultra and include adjustments for the following:

Post-Processing QualityTexture ResolutionTexture FilteringVolumetric FilteringVolumetric Spotlight QualityGlobal Illumination QualityShadow ResolutionShadow FilteringShadow DetailScreen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)Global ReflectionsScreen Space Reflections (SSR)Fog QualityTerrain QualityFar Object Detail (LOD)Scattered Object Density

Lastly, we have the Ray Tracing options which also has five presets that let you select from Off, Low, Medium, High, & Custom mode. The Ray Tracing settings include:

DLSS Ray ReconstructionDirect LightingDirect Lighting Denoising QualityPath-Traced Indirect LightingPath Traced Indirect Lighting Denoising QualityTransparency

The NVIDIA RTX & DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction Feature Set

Just like Cyberpunk 2077, enabling DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction within Alan Wake 2 will replace two denoisers with an AI-infused algorithm that accurately calculates ray tracing, delivering better visual fidelity and even better performance. If DLSS Ray Reconstruction is disabled or not available, the following fallbacks will apply (two denoisers will instead be enabled, with the quality and the performance cost scaling across the three presets):