Alan Wake 2 patch improves performance by up to 100% on older GeForce GTX 10 Series GPUs

Remedy's Alan Wake II was one of the most technically advanced and visually impressive PC game releases in 2023, pushing advanced path-traced lighting to help sell its spooky horror setting. However, at the time, it did not run well on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 10 Series of graphics cards (which includes the GeForce GTX 1060, 1070, and 1080) due to relying on DirectX 12 Ultimate 'Mesh Shaders' for its rendering.

This DirectX 12 Ultimate feature requires hardware support, which left many PC gamers with 10-Series GPUs unable to play Alan Wake II without severe performance issues. But there's good news! A patch for the PC version will go live tomorrow (March 6) that addresses performance issues on older GPUs like the GeForce GTX 1070 while also boosting performance on modern Ada cards like the GeForce RTX 4070.

The PC tech gurus at Digital Foundry have tested a pre-release version of the patch, and they found a whopping 85 percent improvement in performance with the GeForce GTX 1080 and double the performance with the iconic GeForce GTX 1080 Ti.

• Read more: NVIDIA Game Ready Driver support for the GeForce GTX 10 Series is ending soon
• Read more: NVIDIA's RTX Kit for developers updated with game-changing AI-powered RTX Neural Shaders
• Read more: Alan Wake 2's DLSS 4 update is here and it's the first game to add RTX Mega Geometry

Even the GeForce GTX 1060 sees an impressive 45 percent increase in performance when testing the same demanding forest sequence. However, even after this patch, Alan Wake II is still a super demanding PC game - requiring a GeForce GTX 1070 to achieve decent 30 FPS performance using the game's low-quality settings. Still, the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti can "deliver a PS5-style upscaled 1440p experience on equivalent performance mode settings" - which is impressive.

Of course, modern GPUs with native mesh shader support still have a better time with Alan Wake 2, but this patch will open the game to many more PC gamers. According to the latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey results for February 2024, many people are still rocking GeForce GTX 10 Series cards.

For those with a new GeForce RTX 40 Series card, Digital Foundry adds that you can expect a 14 percent improvement in rasterization performance and a six percent improvement in path tracing performance. Great job, Remedy!