Upscaling Alan Wake II
Alan Wake II is a survival horror game and the long-awaited sequel to Remedy Entertainment’s cult classic, Alan Wake. This time, the story takes a darker turn, delving deeper into the psychological and supernatural elements that made the original so compelling. Players can expect a chilling atmosphere, intense combat encounters, and a mind-bending narrative that will keep them on the edge of their seats.
So starting with the performance side of things, we find tha in Alan Wake II that when we look at native performance at 77 FPS and 37ms of latency, things are perfectly playable at 1440p, though a simple switch and turning on DLSS into balanced mode, the performance jumps by 82%, while also cutting latency down by 15ms. For those who want more, as we move up through the various frame generation settings, we’re able to push another 330% performance, while latency remains around the same level of native performance.
When we look at raytracing, this as standard, has much higher latency levels and of course, much lower performance, now at a level where you’d need upscaling to even make it playable. Thankfully, just by setting DLSS to balanced mode, gives us another 119% more performance while reducing the latency by half, though if you’re happy with slightly higher latency, that is still lower than native, while also increasing performance by 544%, then keeping DLSS set to balanced but enabling frame generation X4 will net you some serious improvements.
Moving onto Cyberpunk and this is a little different, as you can actually change the model that it uses with options for CNN or Transformer. Again, we do see a steady increase across the various upscaling presets with the most aggressive, giving us huge gains of around 267% when comparing native to X4 in both CNN or Transformer models while also keeping latency pretty close to native, though individual choices can be made about striking a balance between lower latency with lower framerates in this case.
When we enable raytracing, it’s pretty clear to see that at native on an RTX 5070, even at 1440p, that we’re on the cusp of what I’d class as playable frame rates at just 34 FPS in the averages, and 24 FPS in the lows and with 66ms of latency. The CNN model consistently does better here, but we are talking small margins, and either will net you some huge performance jumps while simultaneously reducing latency by quite some margins, including DLSS with no frame generation cutting the latency essentially, in half.
