The biggest new video game that will debut this week is Alan Wake 2. Remedy Entertainment"s long-awaited sequel to its horror-themed third-person game is launching for the Xbox Series X and S consoles, the PS5 console, and the PC via the Epic Games Store.
Ahead of the launch, NVIDIA is showing off the visual effects the PC version of Alan Wake 2 will have when running on its GeForce RTX cards, and on its 40 Series of GPUs in particular. In a blog post, NVIDIA states the game will support full ray tracing and DLSS 3.5 on those GPUs.
NVIDIA states:
In Alan Wake 2, full ray tracing cranks the quality of ray-traced effects to 11. Transparent and opaque reflections recreate their surroundings at full resolution, heightening immersion. Indirect and direct light bounces up to three times, while techniques such as Screen Space Reflections, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and rasterized Global Illumination are unified into a single algorithm, enabling the rendering of naturally lit locales with greater detail and realism.
The game"s support of NVIDIA"s DLSS 3.5 technology will, combined with ray tracing, offer PC gamers with GeForce RTX Series 40 GPUs support for the game"s Ray Reconstruction graphics feature:
In Alan Wake 2, flickering lights abound, and with Ray Reconstruction enabled their fully ray traced lighting is more responsive, and the quality of the lighting is noticeably more accurate and realistic, greatly improving the overall experience.
The new Game Ready Driver for NVIDIA"s GeForce GPUs that will add support for Alan Wake 2 is scheduled to be available for download after 6 a.m. Pacific time (9 a.m. Eastern time) on October 26, a day before the game launches. Remedy has already revealed the PC hardware requirements for the game.
Remedy has also announced on its X (formerly Twitter) account that preloads for both the Xbox and PlayStation versions of Alan Wake 2 should be available right now. The file sizes for the preloads are about the same for all three platforms, with the PS5 at 85 GB, the Xbox version at 82 GB, and the PC port at 86 GB.