Alan Wake 2 – why are GeForce GTX 1000 and Radeon RX 5000 graphics cards not supported? There is an important reason

In just a few days, the long-awaited premiere of Alan Wake 2 will take place, which has a chance to be not only a very good production in itself, but also may be the most beautiful game that will go on sale this year. On Friday evening, Remedy published the hardware requirements, which show that Alan Wake 2 will be an extremely demanding title for graphics cards. It also turns out that this may be one of the first games to take full advantage of DirectX 12 Ultimate libraries.

According to one of the developers from the Remedy studio, the lack of support for GeForce GTX 1000 and Radeon RX 5000 cards in Alan Wake 2 is due to the advanced use of Mesh Shaders, one of the functionalities of the DirectX 12 Ultimate libraries.

Alan Wake 2 PC hardware requirements – Studio Remedy recommends using NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR techniques

In the hardware requirements of Alan Wake 2, the minimum recommended graphics cards were NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 and AMD Radeon RX 6600. You won’t find older generations here, i.e. Pascal (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000) or RDNA (AMD Radeon RX 5000). The reason for the lack of support for the above-mentioned card models does not result from Ray Tracing support (it can be disabled after all). According to a now deleted post by one of the people working at Remedy, the lack of support for these cards is related to another functionality of the DirectX 12 Ultimate libraries, which was embedded deep in the game. We are talking about the so-called Mesh Shaders.

Alan Wake 2 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X was created to play at 30 frames per second

Mesh Shaders can be described as more advanced mesh shading. For this purpose, new graphic pipelines are used (graphics papeline is, simply put, the data flow path between the graphics card interface and the frame buffer containing the ready 3D animation frame). The new pipelines will allow the GPU to simultaneously control the level of detail of objects in combination with tessellation. Mesh Shaders increases the quality of the geometry of objects visible in a given scene (a few years ago, developers were able to prepare technology demos where scenes were composed of 1.8 billion triangles, which directly affects the detail and the amount of visible details) and allows for greater flexibility when designing games, while being easy to implement into graphics engines. However, Mesh Shaders are only supported from the Turing generation (NVIDIA) and RDNA 2 (AMD) and for this reason older card models are not supported by the game. It is very likely that Alan Wake 2 will turn out to be one of the best demonstrations of the capabilities of the DirectX 12 Ultimate libraries, of which both Mesh Shaders and Ray Tracing are a part.

Additionally, head of communications at the Remedy studio posted a message on X (Twitter), which clearly shows that the final version of Alan Wake 2 looks and works even better than during the May PlayStation Showcase (when material from the PlayStation 5 console was shown). Mentioned were the increased number of visible objects in scenes, better performance and fully refined color gradation. In the case of consoles, we are talking about both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The Series S version is still questionable.

Source: DSOGaming, X @RiotRMD