Damn right...last generation was plagued by UE4 fatigue. Every game eventually looked the same and with the same flaws over and over again. Hopefully developers take inspiration from Remedy or even developers like Guerilla, Naughty Dog, Insomniac, Square, etc that you can make your own engine still in 2023.

I really hope Remedy will get the praise they deserve for it, and that it keeps being economically viable for them to continue using in-house tech. Even though studios like CD Project Red have had issues with their own engines, it's still sad when they abandon their tech for UE.

Northlight has received a massive influx of cash, resources and overhauls since 2019s control. It was good then but it is a world class engine now. As good as UE5

​@@KefazXNah, all of their games are trainwrecks on the technical side, especially on console.

And somehow they managed Frame Generation with vsync. At least it looks like it in game. Where Cyberpunk still struggles there. Constant breaks in image if you do not have G or Freesync

Yeah, the developers have already done the hard work balancing IQ and performance, so why not copy them? The only big difference is RT performance, particularly on the Nvidia side. Oh, and also Texture filtering can almost always be turned up on PC for whatever reason, maybe it's the shared RAM pool.

@@brewski535 Yeah it feels like the Ray Tracing/Path Tracing was only meant to work optimally on 40-series Nvidia cards. Seems like they intentionally wanted it to only be used alongside DLSS/DLAA and Frame Generation and they optimized it towards that, so AMD cards owners aren't really going to be able to enjoy the feature unless they have a top of the line card (and even then I doubt they'd be able to get good FPS beyond 1080p).

@@brewski535 Memory Bandwidth.

​@@hallyuniverseWhat i really don't understand in regards of better performance for a wider range of gpus, is the lack of RTAO as an option besides Path Tracing. RTAO is the most performant rt feature of all and yet very impactful on visual quality. It even runs on a GTX 1060 without any rtx hardware at all per compute shaders. Instead remedy opted for sh..y screen space ao with all the terrible issues like artifacts around objects, vanishing at the edges and lights leaking. RTAO could have really helped a lot of gamers. It is even already implemented in the graphics engine as a final step after 1 to 3 light bounces in the path tracing pipeline.

Dont have the game yet but I would lower the rays or bounces first and than think about AO. This game reminds me on Witcher3 s HaireWorks.

The average Gamer will never understand the difference between those 2 and will always blame the developer before he even upgrades the driver. Thank god this game isnt released on steam. Can you imagine the outrage by 2060 rtx users that cannot run this game in 16k 480 fps?

@@SaithMasu12 lmao I guess it's probably better for those people to stick to console since it's clearly the "smarter not harder" was to play these newer titles, hit start and it just works most of the time. Especially since it seems like most of these new titles are not given much thought when getting ported to PC

nah, this game's shit while not looking noticeably better than anything else, just like Control. Remedy has done nothing of note after Max Payne, they make the equivalent of a Netflix show that gets cancelled after 1 season, and they've done that 3 games in a row, really I should say they have done nothing of note since they released Max Payne 2 in 2003, so about two decades worth of completely forgettable games.

@@KvltKommando 😂 the Netflix analogy

AW2 having DLSS & FSR as mandatory really unveils its optimization issues. Also the "smart devs" decided to lock out everyone with no AVX2 instructions . Maybe a patch will solve the issue tho.. as this happened with CP2077 they fixed it eventually. The point is : okay make tour game visually appealing but also include a potato pc setting for the poorest of gamers. You are having less sales with these sh@ty practice. Also a big turnoff is the Epic Store deal. Do you know how many have pirated the game just to not buy it on Epic ?

Hardware Unboxed does

@@destroyermaker No, Hardware Unboxed does not meticulously inspect console graphics settings and compare them against the PC's settings.

​@@destroyermakerabsolutely not. They do benchmarks with everything at ultra settings and then whine.

@@garrusvakarian8709 sure, they made that video, then they review mid and low end GPUs at ultra settings and cry foul. Those two guys are full of themselves

no. lmfao@@destroyermaker

seriously it was like a different person

I really thought it was a different person until the usual german greeting at the ending

It sounds like someone else re-recorded lines and used an AI to try and imitate his voice

Honestly the voice thing is frying my brain, he suddenly sounds like a different American dude

I was also quite perplexed by this change! 😅 He might be using a different microphone. In my opinion he sounds better in the second half. 🤓

Not to people who can't stomach horror... :-/

But there's no discussion on the different ray-tracing options 😢

@@DavidAlfredoGuisado This was just a preview of how scalable the game is and the kind of misleading spec requirements from Remedy. We will get a more in depth analysis for PC probably next week. DF never disappoints! 😄

@@DavidAlfredoGuisado turn it off. raytracing in this game is basically useless.

@@DavidAlfredoGuisado Alex said in the video he'll be covering ray and path tracing next week.

Immortals of aveum uses lumen and nanite that's why it's intensive

The amount of comments I've seen of people calling AW2 devs "lazy" for apparently not optimizing their game is mind boggling. Meanwhile its one of the only games on the market that supports mesh shading, you know, a very modern optimization technique

I hope my RX 480 can run Alan wake 2 😢

Upvote just for "Sporfoken"

Finally a comment with actual thought behind it

Exactly. It cleans up the flaws but that cleaning up is expensive. Looks good everywhere!

which also makea you wonder such big perfomance hit...

"I remember when low settings would fundamentally change the look and feel of a game" That's what low is supposed to do in order for games to be playable on a much wider set of hardware. Low looking good is not a good thing when there's only a 20% difference in performance compared to ultra

I do not care about graphical fidelity nearly as much as I do about games being playable at 60 FPS, and I suspect that most people do, too. To that end, I'd much rather have low settings that look like crap but are comfortably playable on my crap-tier system, than having low settings look gorgeous but being relegated to playing the game on KZfaq.

@@hrkljusWell, game developers could lower the graphics so much that the game would become a PS2 potato fest, would be playable in any PC, but at the expense of artistic expression and art direction. Remedy believes that a certain level of realism is necessary for the game to be immersive, that's why the low settings are still pretty. But you can wait for modders to lower the graphics beyond Remedy's presets if you want.

The problem here is that it was never explained. So, the requirements are just put out there without any communication. What annoyed me a little was the condescending attitude some people had (of course they had really access to the game code). Instead of just explaining this or saying nothing, they were pretty dismissive of the concerns without any justification. Sure, NDAs... but then don't say anything because you can't present anything. Honestly, though. I think it is a shame there is no fall-back for mesh shaders like there is for RT. RX 5000 is not an ancient piece of hardware!

yeah it was a surprise for me... now it explains the issues

It does not clarify what kind of alternative ray tracing you are using( SDFGI, Voxel Tracing, SSGI) you are using, it may simply be lying to justify the poor performance. Lineman said he was using GI backed.

@@Eternalduoae But those people wanted to tell everyone as much as they were allowed. They're under NDA so they can't say 'the game runs fine and looks good'. They can only say 'you don't need to worry about it' or stuff like that. Regarding mesh shader fallbacks - well there _is_ a fallback. If they hadn't implemented a vertex shader path for this, the game would just crash on a GTX1080 or any other GPU without mesh shaders. But the fallback can't give good _performance_ because if they could have good performance without mesh shaders then they wouldn't need mesh shaders.

@@josecangrejo3086 didn't df video on ps5 aw2 explained they are using SDF for specular lighting, lighting dynamic objects and reflections, that's literally software ray tracing..

And every gen it gets harder for normal people to even have a chance to play these games

@@ni9274Get a console then, you want the best looking game ever maxed out you will need to pay for it.

​​@@ni9274wdym? console market getting bigger and bigger with each gen

Control 2 is going to melt eyeballs

@@ni9274 This is completely normal. It was the last decade that was the aberration due to Ps4 and X1 launching EXTREMELY underpowered for their time, and then games being held back for sake of cross-gen for a few years of this gen too. Games stagnated, due to being shackled to Ps4/X1 2011 era laptop tier hardware, and so did the requirements, luring people who never got to experience a proper generational leap into a false sense of security. Back in the 00's, games were putting GPU's of the previous generation in their grave, sometimes - they even pulverized the contemporary generation, like the famous Crysis. Post like these are, no offense - "how to tell me you got into PC gaming in the last decade, without telling me you got into PC gaming in the last decade" in a nutshell.

They recommended 540p medium for rtx3070, you can also see it in this video. The fact that it can run at 1080p native without problems means that people who complained about requirements were right. 540p looks bad, but Digital Foundry can't say it for some reason, and that requirements were silly and misinformation, to promote 40 series cards.

at least you are not one of those bots roaming arround the steam forum and complain why a new next gen game isnt running great on 10 year old hardware, which i kid you not is a common thing these days.

​@@SaithMasu12most people's PCs are less powerful than the current consoles which most games are going to be optimized for now. Not shocking that these games don't run well on their systems lmao.

@@1GTX1games running good for me on medium preset 4k dlss quality on my 3080

@@gotworc the Series S is somewhere around the power of a GTX 1650, the hardware floor of this generation shouldn't be that high

They absolutely nailed it

lol yeah, I was going to say that it sounds like he hit puberty at that point and his voice changed. Realistically speaking, I think he's just under the weather. I caught a cold earlier this week and my voice has been deeper than usual. He'll likely go back to his old self as soon as it clears up.

I would prefer the sizzling anyway, turning reflections off looks horrible and very weird and destroys immersion in the woods with the puddles and all, even the sizzling doesnt do that

Even PS4 era games if you think about it. The CPU in the PS4/Xbox One was outdated the day it released. I can remember several games where the lowest graphical settings you could choose on PC was still higher than the settings used on PS4/Xbox One; that is to say, the console versions were running custom settings unique to the consoles that were even lower than low. I think Red Dead 2 was one of these games. But because this current gen of consoles has some really solid hardware, “low” is the new medium. If that makes sense. So your comment rings true for sure even for more recent games.

What's incredible to me is how many people are complaining that GPUs which are older than the consoles (& 4-5 years old at that), aren't able to effectively run games which were designed for the consoles. As if this should be something anyone should expect? That's never been a reasonable expectation! An RX7600 is $250 new, it's not like PC hardware is dangling out of reach in the distant sky! And those trying to make it a class issue, give me a break. PC gaming has always been more expensive, and consoles are there as they always were. Someone who wants to be buying new AAA games day 1 on release, but the cost of a midrange GPU upgrade 4 years later is too much, probably needs to pick a lane!

And what's bad about it ? Let more people enjoy and be able to buy the game. I won't upgrade my pc just for 1-2 games when others are trash and not worth anyway. Stop with these consumerism comments. Think about us poor bastards who can't afford a 4090 .

@@johnny2598 Well the alternative is to just play the newer games on console since you can get a pretty quality presentation on the current gen consoles these days. If you want graphical quality above the current gen consoles on PC, it’s going to cost you. These new consoles aren’t like last gen where games were releasing at 900p with sub 30fps performance and incredibly low graphical settings. That’s why I own both a PS5 and a gaming PC but their rolls have reversed every since the release of current gen. Prior to PS5, I’d use my PC for the superior graphics/performance since it shat on my PS4 Pro. But now my PS5 kicks my PC’s dick in so I use the console for new games for the best experience and my PC for last gen titles, especially since Sony has terrible backwards compatibility support as you get zero benefit playing last gen games on PS5 unless the devs release a patch. And even then it’s a toss up.

True

I think the Medium preset was closest to the console graphics on HZD, that might be most games these days! Or low-ish, in this case.

Valheim looks better

It looks like a blurry mess

don't compare cartoon with real life@@amirhb7531

​@@kartikranjha1533it's anything but. Easily the best visuals I've seen in a game.

yes, even at low settings.

this a paid video. to make ps5 look inferior with usual 3 times zoom to catch that very tiny difference that u cant while playing game as intended. this is weirdo stuff. and plain psychotic. but even if we take this weirdness seriously. no way alan wake 2 comes close to horizon forbidden west or spiderman 2. hell spiderman 2 runs locked 60 fps with ray tracing covering the enitre water surface in an open world setting. also alan wake 2 animations look stiff. and its world is incredibely linear. with no complex simulations of ai and other world simulations like dynamic weather or night and day cycle happening in the background. like in case of horizon sm 2..

Mid-range GPU at this point is RTX 2060 and RTX 3060, and no they are not running this game great at 1080p, which is actually 540p with DLSS.

​@@J0rdan912what are you talking about. I have a Rx 6600 and I run it natively at 1080p. It runs great.

at 40fps 😁@@nikhilabi2230

​@@nikhilabi2230It runs great, as long as you consider 30 FPS "running great". Personally, I do not.

@@J0rdan912 not true based off the benchmarks from those cards

I wonder if using mesh shaders would increase performance in other games that perform badly, or are they only useful with extremely high geometric detail like we see here, where classic vertex shaders get completely crippled.

Best comment you are right

At this point it would be wiser to get a console that will have the perfomance of the game guaranteed (after all that's the baseline devs are using to create games) than spending the same money for a 3070 that's going to be bottlenecked.

Crypto caused the prices to skyrocket. When that ended Nvidia thought "hmmm, people are desperate enough to pay these fake prices..." It will only stop when people stop paying. But they won't as there are a lot of nerds with more money than sense, and nothing more interesting to do than play video games.

This. I hate when i see people moan about it being poorly optimised because they aren't willing to spend the money needed to max it out. Developers like Remedy & CDPR are pushing the industry forward and i'd hate for them to lower their ambitions to make a bit more money in sales.

@@nick4810 not everyone has cash for extra expensive gpu.

@@nanenab8744 true. so they should buy a console

​@@nanenab8744then lower your settings and resolution. It's not rocket science.

@@nanenab8744 PC Gaming always was expensive and required young people to make some money somehow to afford the upgrades they wanted. I don't like to be the guy that says "get a job then" but it's true in this case.

Is Cyberpunk Overdrive also playable on a 3080 at 1080p?

​@@DionyzosIt is.

@@Dionyzos Playing at 4k DLSS performance with path tracing enabled on a 3090. looks and runs great.

Same here!

@@varshoee When you say "runs great" what do you consider great? Genuine question here, because I have the same card, started the game with the same 4K DLSS perf. settings + path tracing... And a mix of medium and high in the rest of the settings. I got around 35-48ish FPS in the opening five minutes (the bit before you take control of Saga). 35 FPS was too low for me, so I had to relinquish the dream of path tracing.

yeah its pretty frustrating. when i turn rt off, its not just for visuals. i want to regain performance. thats not going to happen if rt off = rt software renderer. which sounds like even worse performance.

Playing on a 3070 right now. Getting around 60 fps on 1080p medium DLSS quality. Had to turn on vsync because the frames were jumping all over the place between 30ish to 90 at times. Truly a shit a experience without a freesync display. But it's fine now.

​@@Kasper0822I have recently discovered that you can use a plugin in rivatuner (the utility that comes with MSI afterburner to cap fps) to map hotkeys that lets you change the frame cap. This way when the game struggles too much you cap at 30, when it's running better you cap at 60 ! The plugin is called hotkeyhandler and is included with rivatuner 7.3.4.

Most modern games, lower settings are not bad at all. It's what most consoles use as their settings. I think we just grew with this notion that we need to max out everything, even when it don't need to be, and low settings = bad, even tho AW2 on low settings is prettier to look at than most AAA games on High. I think AW2 justifies its PC requirements by having a really next gen experience, unlike some UE5 games that are also really demanding, even tho the game isn't even impressive.

@@Kasper0822I’m not playing at 1080p on my 4K TV! Gonna look blurry regardless of how good the game looks.

@@jose131991 doesn't look that bad. I'll pick that over bad framerates anyway.

Why? Any PC with a 2060 blows away all the consoles. If you play on a real potato, you probably wont touch this game, or shouldnt. Consoles should just stay with their mixed low/ultra low settings

It's easier to optimized for a ps5 than thousands of different hardware combinations. PC will always have worse optimization than consoles. Games are always built to run on consoles first and PC second

We can be grateful that Epic Store customers will beta-test the game for us before we buy it discounted and patched up next year.

​@@azmc4940like fortnite, yeah? they are publisher this time

@@azmc4940 Alan Wake remastered was released on the Epic store 2 years ago and still no steam release, so it's not looking good for a steam release for Alan Wake 2 ever unfortunately.

​@@azmc4940i mean unlike Control, this game is fully funded by Epic so it may not ever see Steam

​@@azmc4940I dont think it will ever hit Steam tbh. Without Epic, this game wouldnt exist. I doubt that they will let go of it easily.

change your hobby if you can't afford PC upgrades every 5 years

@@Voltomess There plenty of games already, but you’re right. I shouldn’t be worried about this. Anyways, Remedy will not end up like what happened with Asendant Studios.

@@lumirairazbyte9697 there's always consoles and you can screw that pc master race 😁😁

I don’t own a pc as well. Never will. It’s got nothing to do with cost. I just simply don’t want one. But I still watch nearly all of Alex’s videos too.

I totally feel ya. When you buy a console, you are buying games that have been thoroughly tested by the devs, who have picked the absolute most optimal and stable settings, without having to juggle with 20 setting on a PC. You just download the game on PS5, you hit play, and it just works. PC devs need to do a better job for optimized settings, without requiring videos like these. Alex should not have to be the middle-man here, when Remedy, or Nvidia should be doing this too. I'll bet the Game Ready Drivers have all settings set to low, when in fact, after seeing Alex's analysis here, not all settings need to be low. It's strange, and a pain in the ass. lol@@XgamerdaveX

@@BeersYourFriend This game is not good on the Ps5 either.. Also you don't need to ''juggle'' with 20 settings on PC, click auto.. done. Consoles are just locked down PC at lower end tier.

So are you setting it at high or low? Because high will cause a big performance drop off

@@mlgcactus1035 I'd see what high with heavy upscaling would get on my machine, but it's gonna be a hot minute until I get the chance to try it. We love timed exclusives.

@ironeleven at least epic did fund the development of this game, so they have a valid excuse this time.

Laziness. basically, Konami always been lazy

@@matthewjuarbe5826 Sure - lets say maximum laziness and lack of care. Even then, whats the bottleneck? I'm talking from the perspective of a casual hobbyist developer. I genuinely can't fathom why these games would run so relatively badly, unless theres some reallllly bizarre stuff going on internally, something like partial emulation in the way that some of the mario 3D all stars collection works. ..But Ive heard, apparently very conclusively, that that isnt the case, from dataminers.

Metal Gear Solid 1 is Emulation. that's for sure. Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 are based off of the Xbox 360 HD Collection. i honestly don't know maybe CPU or Memory Bandwidth. Memory Bandwidth Seems to be the main issue for Switch. since on CFW you can overclock the CPU GPU and Memory and we see improvements more in memory overclock then CPU and gpu overclock. but it's also possible given the Switch is primary a mobile console. they were concern with battery life. since going to 60fps would require more CPU power which would use more battery life. but why not make a performance mode for dock mode to target 60fps like in Darksiders@@bud11_2

​@@matthewjuarbe5826 I initially heard it was 360 emulation too, but Ive asked around a little in modding circles and it seems like its not? Either way Id like to know for sure. If it really is 360 emulation then I guess I can excuse them a little, on switch at least edit, misread your comment as 360 emulation. eh whatever

i dont think its 360 emulation its most likely a port of the Xbox 360 HD Collection with Metal Gear Solid 1 being emulated with a custom PS1 emulator. and then a custom UI launcher on top@@bud11_2

Alex always kills it with the background music selection.

Think he just said they were comparable

PlayStation has its own custom built alternative.

What do you mean it can't be turned off?.. never seen a single game where that was the case.

​​​@@seaofrageThis is the first game where I've seen this. There is a toggle with only DLSS/DLAA or FSR, with no option to turn off. See 14:25.

@@LordShrub DLAA is native res

not dlaa is native with dlaa. where is just native with NO aa?@@seaofrage

@@seaofrage It doesn't matter. DLAA can't be turned off and makes it look blurry.

Ryzen 7 3700X and a 3090ti, I should mention.

Cheaper 20 series cards have rather poor performance in this game anyways, so its no biggie if they were the same people considering the 5700xt, especially since it took 4 years lol

RX 5000 owners were lucky that only now the first game to require DX12 Ultimate was released.

DLSS has been great though, so RTX 2000 series cards served their users well (and they released just prior to the HUGE GPU price spikes that came during the pandemic & the 3000 series).

What? It look incredible. Maybe you don't like the art style but on a technical level you need to be in serious denial to pretend this isn't really pretty.

ps5 PERFORMANCE settings...ps5 QUALITY notches the level up on several areas as the table in the video shows

Quality even fixes some of the issues Alex pointed out, like the grainy screen space reflections and the fog line in the distance. You have to play at 30fps, tho newer games feel relatively smooth at 30, I have noticed. Callisto Protocol at 30fps felt pretty good to play for example, probably thanks to the good motion blur

a mixture of low and Medium . PS5 Quality is probably Medium to High , but I am just speculating here

Honestly, not acceptable for a console that is barely 3 years old. Seems like they should have just skipped the console release altogether.

@@Nessmith11 But did you see the video? Low settings in this game look like ultra in other games.

Bro stick with DLSS whenever you can

THIS! How the f*ck does this game look better than A Plague Tale Requiem or Horizon Forbidden West to anyone with normal eyes? lol. The game looks good for sure, but enough to warrant my 4090/i7 13700kf only getting 80 fps at 3440 x 1440p with ultra settings with DLSS quality on? Hell no!

Yeah, to the "average joe" this game probably just looks like another RE Engine title, especially because of the similar gameplay.

It's called diminishing returns, we passed that point over a decade ago. The first few times you double the detail(while doubling the processing load) the results are huge, but they diminish with time. Imagine having a square and trying to turn it into a circle by doublinmg the amount of sides each time, the firsdt few time you do this, the results are immediately apparent, but the difference from going from 256 sides, to 512 is not so readily apparent. That doesn't mean the medium should stop evolving and pushing hardware. Just clench your teeth and deal with it. Unoptimized shovelware full of memory leaks and unnecessary draw calls are one thing, well optimized games pushing the medium forward from technical standpoint that look om low how its contemporaries do on ultra are something else entirely. Stop holding gaming back by demanding parity with 2011 era laptop tier hardware. Because that's what you were getting for the last decade, games held back by Ps4 and X1. I can't max it out either, but I'm happy we're finally ditching that dead weight.

@@TheKain202 Were RDR2, Arkham Knight, Days Gone, GOW2018 or Horizon Forbidden West diminishing returns ? i love AW2 but let's not pretend this game didn't finally catch up to our expectations of looking as good as those games did this late into the generation

The most simple options to play kinda like what Horizon Zero Dawn did with it console/original settings.

It's not really surprising though, people don't drop $4000 on a rig with a 7900X3D and 4090 to get 60fps using DLSS performance mode. Sure, the technology improving is great, but if it doesn't scale well to what people in the market actually have then they aren't going to respond that well. Also, putting 30fps targets on the system requirements listing for a PC game is just beyond stupid, no one considers 30fps an acceptable target frame rate on PC.

@@arsoul3591 true but if you wanna blame anyone blame the GPU industry as it currently is. Launching 50 series cards as 60s and charging for 70s money... if GPU prices were as they have been since forever not many people would complain. And I don't wanna hear excuses about inflation and crap like that, maybe that would justify a 30% ish increase in price (although CPUs, memory and other PC components are currently largely unaffected by this, 🤔) but not this travesty of GPU prices we currently have.

@@JPgreekgaming Agreed on the GPU market, I've been PC gaming for like 15 years and this was the year that I switched mostly to console because of the market being exploited, launcher bloat, epic exclusives, lazy ports and no quality control. It's all a shit show.

Can you tell me about the quality of 540p upscaled to 1080p that was recommended on 3070, also can you tell me why Digital Foundry had no comment about it, even though those requirements were not only silly, but as it turned out it was misinformation.

@@1GTX1 I'm not talking about this game in particular but graphics settings in general, although I do believe presets should not mess with internal rendering resolution whatsoever. In this case however it seems to be a mishap on the Devs part because clearly the 3070 is capable of much more than what the recommended specs suggested. What boggles my mind though is why can't Devs provide optimised DF like settings as a baseline/console preset? God of war has the "original" preset which mirrors ps5 settings. DF optimised settings have shown us time and time again that they are super close to console settings so clearly they could provide a "standard" preset.