Ray Tracing Alan Wake 2
Alan Wake II pushes the boundaries of visual fidelity with its ambitious implementation of “full ray tracing,” also known as path tracing. This means ray tracing handles all lighting, reflections, and shadows, creating a more realistic and immersive environment. The game features ray-traced direct lighting for accurate and dynamic shadows, ray-traced indirect lighting for realistic bounced light, ray-traced reflections on surfaces like water and glass, and ray-traced transparency for convincing interaction with transparent objects.
Booting back into Alan Wake II, but now with ray tracing set to high and upscaling set to balanced, and at 1440p, the 5070 Ti lags 8% behind the RTX 4080, though it does deliver fairly strong low figures in comparison. It also provides a margin of error improvement of 4% over the 4070 Ti and an 8% lead over the 4070 Ti SUPER. Retesting garnered the same result, so there are some slightly odd results for the 4070 Ti SUPER here, but at such small margins, there is not really much in it anyway. What is worth discussing, though, is the huge uplift in ray tracing performance over the 3070 Ti, to the tune of 206%. However, that may be more of a testament to how far behind the Ampere GPU is, rather than how far ahead the Blackwell-based 5070 Ti is.
It is the same again as we move up to 4K. The 4070 Ti and the SUPER variant are separated by just 3 FPS, and retesting gave us the same result, so perhaps our Ti model is just that good, and our SUPER card is not. Either way, our 5070 Ti sits just 1 FPS higher than the 4070 Ti, which is a bit of a moot point. Again, though, we see a strong 152% lead over the RTX 3070 Ti, so those looking to upgrade for more ray tracing performance are in for a treat.
