A forum post shows how different the demands on a game can be – or how difficult sarcasm can be to detect.
Alan Wake 2 is an exceptional title in various respects, which causes discussions. With regard to the technology, this applies on the one hand to the often very attractive and atmospheric graphics.
On the other hand, the system requirements of the horror game made high waves in the run-up to its release.
The title is therefore also a topic on Reddit again and again, but partly in strongly different directions, as a (current post) shows. The caption reads Runs really well for a [GTX] 1650, everything is either on “Low” or “Off” with FSR 2 Ultra Performance
The thread creator also keeps speaking up in the comments. Most of the time it seems to us that he means the statement in the title seriously and not sarcastically.
That one can estimate this completely differently, shows however the following comment to the contribution:
The amount of people who don’t realize the title is sarcasm scares me.
There’s something wrong
That doesn’t refer to the performance, which is around the 30 to 40 FPS range according to the thread creator’s comments.
Instead, it’s about the graphics bug in the form of an ugly character model that doesn’t fully load, which could almost be considered a horror element itself.
On the other hand, the following (promotional) video from Nvidia illustrates what the other end of the spectrum of Alan Wake 2’s graphical quality can look like, showing the impact of ray tracing and DLSS 3.5 in the game:
The graphics card is not the only problem
As is clear in the comments, the thread creator’s PC not only has a GPU that is too low on VRAM according to the official system requirements (4.0 GBytes instead of 6.0 GBytes), but also a disk that is too slow.
According to this, the game is installed on an HDD, while the official hardware requirements call for at least an SSD with 90 GBytes of storage space.
The result: agonizingly long loading times, which are ultimately too much for the PC owner:
I don’t really care about the graphics, but then the loading times are a bit too long (it takes about 10 minutes to finish loading):
Compared to the many PC gamers with very fast hardware, such as a Geforce RTX 4090, who are quite numerous on Reddit, obviously quite different standards are set for the gaming experience here.
Modern technology meets lame PCs
The GTX 1650 used here comes in second in Steam‘s (hardware survey) at just under 4.7 percent, followed closely by the not-much-faster GTX 1060 from 2016 (4.6 percent).
The first GPU above Nvidia’s X(X)60 series appears in seventh place (RTX 3070, 3.5 percent).
When you also consider that the official system requirements of Alan Wake 2 are rather too high (you can read more about that in the technology check linked below), the thread creator’s surprise about the performance of his GTX 1650 fits into the overall picture.
How do you assess the situation? Is the Reddit post sarcasm or is the thread creator serious about the title despite the rather off-putting screenshot? Also, have you had a chance to try out Alan Wake 2 for yourselves? If so, what are your impressions of the graphics and performance, and what hardware are you playing on? Feel free to post it in the comments!
