Alan Wake 2 PC Requirement Specs Are Bone Crushing, How To Prepare Your Rig
by
Thiago Trevisan
—
Saturday, October 21, 2023, 12:47 PM EDT
Bring out your big, powerful GPUs my friends - Alan Wake 2 is coming. It's been a roller coaster year of PC game releases. Optimized and buggy titles run the gamut of what's possible in the scope of "readiness". Games such as Redfallnot only proved to be filled with technical issues, but the game itself was lackluster according to many. That's a combination which will tank any new release, no matter the hype it receives.
Developers have to often work with a very fine line of what's acceptable in terms of performance. There is a huge variety of PC hardware that games have to run on, compared to the singular nature of consoles. First, let's get the optimization issue out of the way: If a game is poorly ported or coded for the PC, it doesn't matter what the hardware requirements are. It will run below the expectation of gamers, period. Sure, a GeForce RTX 4090 will run at a higher frame rate, but you may run into similar stuters, bugs, or experience marring issues as someone on an entry level GPU.
What can you do to prepare your rig Alan Wake 2? Let's take a look at the requirements, and we will give you some suggestions to level-up before release:
The second issue is the pure brute force required to run some games, even those which are well optimized for the PC platform. Take Cyberpunk 2077 as an example of a game that needs loads of horsepower, and had various teething issues initially. It's now in a much better state of polish, especially with technologies such as NVIDIA's DLSS 3.5 with ray reconstruction.
This is where we arrive at Alan Wake 2, which has some demanding requirements. The easy ones are the 16GB of system memory, and 90GB SSD requirements. Most gaming rigs should be able to meet these criteria without too much issue. As we approach the CPU requirements, you'll need either an Intel Core i5-7600k or AMD Ryzen 7 3700x. This will apply across the spectrum, even as you approach higher settings and resolutions. It's seems clear this game will be more GPU hungry, as many recent titles are.
The graphics card is where you'll really start to feel the pinch. 8GB of VRAM is fine for 1080p and 1440p, but you'll need 12GB as you enter 4K. The very minimum GPU for this game is either a GeForce RTX 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600, which doesn't bode well for older GPUs. Want to up your eye candy settings? You're going to have to bump up your GPU horsepower. Without ray tracing, you'll need a GeForce RTX 4070 or Radeon RX 7800 XT for Ultra settings at 4K. You can drop those requirements to a GeForce RTX 3060 at medium 1440p settings, but we figure most gamers will want slightly more.
You'll need a beefy rig for Alan Wake 2
Things get really spicy in regard to ray tracing. Want to play on high, coupled with path tracing at 4K? You'll need a beefy GeForce RTX 4080 with 16GB of memory at minimum. While the AMD 7900 XTX with 24GB VRAM should perform well in without ray tracing, the jury is still out on how it will handle ray tracing at the highest levels.
Although we're sure the game will get patched, tweaked, and better optimized over time, the only way to truly prepare your rig to play the game at high resolutions with maximum eye candy is to upgrade your GPU. You'll still be able to play with less powerful hardware, but you'll have to keep the resolution and image quality settings in check.
