Alan Wake 2 system requirements cause controversy due to upscaling requirement

If you want to play Alan Wake 2 on the PC with Full HD resolution and 60 frames per second, DLSS or FSR 2 will be mandatory according to the system requirements. Only high-end GPUs are spared here.

A few days before Halloween 2023, the survival horror game Alan Wake 2 will celebrate its release: On 10/27/2023, those interested can plunge into the latest adventure of the Finnish developer studio Remedy Entertainment.

Good a week ago on (Twitter the PC system requirements) for Alan Wake 2 were presented. These have it not only in terms of the required hardware in itself, but provide because of upscaling obligation for the first controversy before the game is even released.

https://twitter.com/alanwake/status/1715412623468970091

Minimum, Recommended and Ultra: The PC requirements for Alan Wake 2 at a glance

Independently of which settings you want to play Alan Wake 2 in: 16 GByte RAM as well as 90 GByte SSD capacity are mandatory everywhere

A similar picture can be seen with the processor. Here, an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or the corresponding Intel equivalent is specified in almost all performance classes – in our estimation, a Core i7-9700K or better.

Only the minimum PC requirements of Alan Wake 2 deviate from the mentioned CPU. Because in order to get the horror game running at least in some way, a Core i5-7600K or AMD equivalent should be sufficient, which should roughly correspond to a Ryzen 5 1600X.

The really exciting part is the graphics cards that Remedy Entertainment wants to see in your computers.

Now it is certainly still possible to argue for the justifiability of the hardware requirements, if it weren’t for this last row of the table: Because with all the GPUs mentioned, Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR 2 is included in the respective graphics settings.

In general, Remedy Entertainment writes in every configuration that the upscaling technologies have to be on board – so the impression is given that FSR 2 respectively DLSS are mandatory to get Alan Wake 2 running on the PC at all.

Alan Wake 2 with native Full HD only from RTX 4070?

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that first reactions to the published system requirements are basically negative. Especially under the Remedy announcement, there are numerous users who criticize the mandatory use of DLSS/FSR 2.

After all, they say, the two technologies are actually meant to help older hardware run games smoothly, not so that poorly optimized PC games can be brought up to a reasonable level.

The situation looks even worse if a Reddit post is to be believed: Because if you want to play Alan Wake 2 in native Full HD resolution – i.e. without DLSS or FSR 2 – you have to meet the Ultra system requirements.

Alan Wake II : Allegedly Only 7% of players will be able to run the game at real 1080P 60FPS
byu/Surnunu inpcmasterrace

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In concrete terms, this means that a Geforce RTX 4070 or Radeon RX 7800 XT is required for a native gaming experience. Cards like the GTX 1650, which is still popular according to the Steam hardware survey, would not have a chance to run Alan Wake 2 at all.

The performance for console gamers could also be problematic in this context. In view of such high demands, doubts are expressed among social media voices that Playstation 5 or Xbox Series X will get a halfway smooth game.

The upscaling requirement is also a finger pointing to Nvidia’s prediction given by the graphics card manufacturer last month in the wake of the Phantom Liberty release with Digital Foundry.

According to this, native resolutions are no longer up-to-date anyway – AI upscaling like DLSS, on the other hand, is simply a smarter solution.

Now it’s your turn: What do you think about the upscaling requirement for Alan Wake 2? Is Remedy Entertainment’s horror game just the first title of many to declare DLSS and FSR a must-have, or has it just been poorly optimized here? Is Alan Wake 2 even a game you would upgrade your PC for? Leave us your opinion in the comments!