Alan Wake 2 is finally out. Like Remedy’s past games, it pushes the boundaries of 3D rendering, mainly in the lighting department. We tested the game across multiple graphics cards, including the NVIDIA RTX 4090 and the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. Alan Wake II is quite demanding, even without ray tracing, and you’ll need upscaling for a smooth, lag-free experience. Path tracing, enabled at Ray Tracing “High,” requires Frame Generation for acceptable frame rates. Unfortunately, only NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.5 solution is available at the moment.
Test Bench
- CPU: Intel Core i9-13900K.
- Cooler: Lian Li Galahad 360
- Motherboard: ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero.
- Memory: 16GB x2 @6000MT/s CL38.
- PSU: Corsair RM1000E
Alan Wake 2 Benchmarks: NVIDIA RTX 4090 vs AMD RX 7900 XTX
At the default “Ultra” settings without ray tracing or path tracing, our two fastest GPUs managed an average of over 100 FPS. At 1080p, the GeForce RTX 4090 averaged 117 FPS, followed by the Radeon RX 7900 XTX with 101 FPS at the Ultra quality preset. The RX 7900 XT nets 90.6 FPS, while the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti ends last with a 70 FPS average.
At 1440p, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti drops to 51 FPS, while the RX 7900 XT nets 65.5 FPS. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and the RTX 4090 average a comfortable 73 FPS and 87 FPS, respectively.
At 4K, none of the GPUs hit 60 FPS, leaving the GeForce RTX 4090 with 51 FPS and the RX 7900 XTX with 42 FPS on average. The RX 7900 XT drops to 35.7 FPS, while the RTX 3080 Ti clings to 24.5 FPS. And this is without any ray or path tracing.
Alan Wake 2 Ray Tracing Low: No Path Tracing
At the Ray Tracing “Low” quality preset, Alan Wake II uses direct lighting and reflections. Indirect or diffuse lighting which uses path tracing is disabled. Screen space reflections and rasterized global illumination remain enabled. Players with NVIDIA RTX GPUs can enable Ray Reconstruction, which uses an AI-based denoiser to improve lighting quality and performance.
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At 1080p, the GeForce RTX 4090 is the only GPU that manages an average of over 60 FPS, while the rest drop to 40 FPS and lower. Unlike rasterization, the RTX 3080 Ti is faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XT and the 7900 XTX.
At 1440p, all but the RTX 4090 drop to less than 30 FPS, with lows nearing single-digit figures. The NVIDIA Ada flagship averages 63.6 FPS, while the RTX 3080 Ti manages 29.7 FPS. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX nets 27 FPS with lows of 12.7 FPS. Its XT sibling follows shortly. The RTX 4090 is twice as fast as the RX 7900 XTX with basic low-quality ray tracing. You can guess what happens with path tracing enabled.
At 4K, the GeForce RTX 4090 maintains an average of 30 FPS while the rest of the GPUs fall to early-to-mid teens, with single-digit lows.
Alan Wake 2 Path Tracing Benchmarks: NVIDIA RTX 4090 vs AMD RX 7900 XTX
Path tracing benchmarks on the next page…
Alan Wake 2 Path Tracing Benchmarks: NVIDIA RTX 4090 vs AMD RX 7900 XTX
With path tracing maxed out, things get hairy real quick. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX/XT drops below 20 FPS with 1% lows of 8-9 FPS. The GeForce RTX 4090, on the other hand, averages a healthy 59 FPS with 48-49 FPS lows. That makes it thrice as fast as the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, without any Frame Generation or Ray Reconstruction.
The Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT produce a nearly identical frametime graph with several painful spikes or stutters.
At 1440p, the Radeons drop to nearly 10 FPS with lows of 4-5 FPS. Meanwhile, the RTX 4090 averages a decent 40 FPS, making it four times faster than the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
To keep the GPUs from melting, we were forced to enable FSR 2/DLSS 3.5. Ray reconstruction is a life-saver for the RTX 3080 Ti, averaging 41.7 FPS at 1080p with path tracing maxed out. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX averages 32 FPS, while the 7900 XT barely falls short of 29 FPS. The GeForce RTX 4090 averages 96 FPS, making it more than three times faster than the 7900 XTX.
At 1440p, the averages drop, but the chart looks mostly the same. 4K pushes the GPUs to their limits. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX averages 17.9 FPS, while the RTX 4090 holds firm at 59.5 FPS. The RTX 3080 continues to outpace the 7900 XTX, averaging 21.5 FPS with lows of 17 FPS, 2x higher than the former. It’s worth noting that even with upscaling in place, the RTX 4090 is more than thrice as fast as the 7900 XTX.
The frametime graph doesn’t reveal anything we didn’t already know. The RX 7900 XTX faces severe stuttering, likely due to path tracing, while the RTX 4090 remains unfazed.
Frame Generation makes the GeForce RTX 4090 unassailable. It already averaged 60 FPS with basic temporal upscaling. FG allows it to achieve nearly 100 FPS with path tracing. That’s remarkable. Alan Wake 2 allows the use of Frame Generation alongside DLAA (native). This renders two frames at native resolution with one interpolated in between. Performance-wise, it’s slower than temporal upscaling but twice as fast as 4K native, which makes sense.
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Alan Wake 2 ties the ray count to the render resolution. The higher your internal resolution, the higher the number of rays cast. It also means that the DLSS/FSR preset determines the original number of rays cast, before the upscaling/interpolation process. This is highlighted by the GPU-busy charts below:
