Alan Wake PC - Ryzen 5 3600 & GTX 1070 - 10th Anniversary Revisit and Testing
5Greetings, everybody.
Today we have another 10’ish year old re-visit: Alan Wake, since this week it’s the game’s 10th anniversary since it released on the Xbox 360, and on PC it launched in 2012, so in essence yeah it’s almost like 10 years for me too.
My current PC specs are the following:
-CPU: Ryzen 5 3600 (stock settings) with Coolermaster Hyper 212 Black RGB.
-Mobo: MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC.
-GPU: Inno3D Twin X2 GTX 1070 (stock) and WHQL driver 445.87.
-RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport LT (2x8GB) CL16 DDR4@3200 Mhz.
-Storage: PNY XLR8 CS3030 1TB NVMe (O.S.), Samsung 750 EVO 500 GB.
-Case: Fractal Design Meshify S2.
-PSU: Corsair RMx 650W 80+ Gold.
-O.S: Windows 10 Pro 64bit.
-Monitor: AOC AGON AG251FG 1080p-240Hz.
Alan Wake is one of my favorite games, also one of the games from Remedy that I like the most, probably I still like Max Payne 2 the most, but really all of them are great.
So it felt natural to reinstall it, once again, and do a quick performance testing and see how things hold up today. And the answer is: pretty good, it’s still a DX9 game, with its limitations, but Remedy really did a great job revamping the MAX-FX engine (used initially for Max Payne 1 and 2, no less), especially the extra lighting tech they implemented in the game. With this philosophy in mind, to keep improving lighting on their games, then in 2016 came Quantum Break, another Remedy game with really nice lighting effects back then.
Alan Wake runs pretty decently on my system, and still looks quite nice; the game offers some graphical presets, but today with our hardware we can pretty much max it out, at least at 1080p. It has Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing enabled at all times, 2x being the minimum, and that can get quite intensive at very high resolutions, but we can use downsampling and find a middle ground there, which I settled at 1620p with 4xMSAA.
The controls are quite decent and the keys can be remapped, not the gamepad buttons though, sadly, and a couple keys like “Enter” or “Backspace” cannot be remapped via in game menus, but can be externally edited in the config files (check PCGamingwiki for all these great tips).
All in all, still a great game, especially for those who enjoy Sam Lake’s style of writing ever since the first Max Payne game, Alan Wake does not disappoint. The game is also pretty cheap usually, it was also free months ago on the Epic Store, I believe, so I doubt there are many people there that don’t have this game…it’d be a grave mistake…because it’s a classic.
As usual, I hope this was interesting to any of you, and I’ll see you in the next one : )
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Some useful timestamps:
[MENUS – SETTINGS]
00:00 - Intro and general menus
01:12 - Key Bindings
02:13 - Graphics Settings
[GAMEPLAY]
03:45 - 1080p Max Settings (w/8xMSAA)
05:11 - Graphics Quality presets (Very Low, etc.)
08:54 - 1440p DSR Downsampling (needs “fix” for more than 60 Hz refresh)
11:00 - 4K DSR Max Settings & MSAA performance impact
13:37 - 1620p with 4xMSAA (best quality/performance combo for GTX1070)
15:13 - Some running around (1620p with 60 FPS cap via Rivatuner)
21:43 - Direct Aiming setting on/off
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#AlanWake #Ryzen3600 #GTX1070