A Vulkan mod might help you run Alan Wake II on older GPUs

Some fanatics were disappointed upon coming across that Alan Wake 2 runs a long way worse on older GPUs than other recent titles. If you must play one of the 12 months's most severely acclaimed games but can't upgrade to a snap shots card that helps mesh shaders, strolling it via a Vulkan compatibility layer might assist. Your mileage may additionally range.

Alan Wake 2 is earning some of the great critiques of 2023. In a 12 months with an strangely excessive range of critically acclaimed releases, Remedy's trendy has emerged in Game of the Year conversations along titles like Baldur's Gate three, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and the Resident Evil four remake.

Gamers who want to play the lately released Alan Wake sequel but best have a Pascal or RDNA 1 GPU may additionally want to attempt a mod that swaps the sport's DirectX 12 implementation for Vulkan. Although, be warned. The installation manner is complicated, still has many problems, and may not paintings for all people. In the first-class-case state of affairs, players on an Nvidia GeForce 1080 Ti or Radeon RX 5700 XT have to simplest count on 1080p gameplay at low pix settings.

Unfortunately, the PC version's requirement of mesh shaders, that can control scene geometry more efficiently than in advance strategies, locks out a few older fanatic GPUs even though they are able to nonetheless handle other recent releases. Some of the weakest cards supporting mesh shaders, like the RTX 2060 or GTX 1660 Ti, usually appear under the GTX 1080 Ti or RX 5700 XT in benchmarks, however Alan Wake 2 exams opposite the scenario.

The latter GPUs typically can't maintain 30fps in native 1080p at the bottom pics settings. This difficulty ought to restrict the game's reach, because the populace of customers nonetheless gambling with older-generation cards isn't insignificant.

Fortunately, a consumer on the TechPowerUp boards observed that a Vulkan-based compatibility layer designed to run DirectX 12 games on Linux ought to lift performance with the aid of as much as 50 percent. With the mod, the 1080 Ti controlled round 37fps in 1080p at the low preset, likely just playable sufficient for a few customers, specially if they join a controller.

The approach is a ways from most efficient, nor is it foolproof. It failed to paintings for Tom's Hardware or a few commenters inside the original discussion board thread. The authentic poster provides several pointers to address issues like changing the DXGI swapchain technique within the Nvidia control panel, disabling the Nvidia overlay, manually putting in Vulkan drivers, and extra.

Attempting the mod with AMD photos playing cards is even extra complicated. The TechPowerUp thread lists a special set of files they require, and some might carry out better on Linux than on Windows. The 5700 XT hit 60fps on Linux in at the least one test. However, these workarounds might not deliver applicable performance to Polaris GPUs like the popular RX 580.

When Remedy defined Alan Wake 2's excessive machine requirements with the aid of noting its dependence on mesh shaders, the developer theorized that mods could lower the barrier to entry. These early Vulkan compatibility experiments will be the first step in the direction of that purpose.

In related information, Remedy released the 1.0.Eight patch for Alan Wake 2 this week. It guarantees over two hundred enhancements and computer virus fixes, that can at the least slightly enhance images and performance.