Remedy has detailed what the PS5 Pro Enhanced label will mean for Alan Wake 2.
As a reminder, when the PS5 Pro was announced last month, Sony revealed that several games will receive an “enhanced” label. This label means that a game will be able to take full advantage of the console's enhanced features, such as advanced ray tracing and a GPU that enables up to 45 percent faster rendering, thanks to a free software update.
Alan Wake 2 will be one of those games, and today Remedy explained how the game's Quality and Performance modes will be updated for PlayStation 5 Pro.
Quality mode will see 30 frames per second with ray tracing (which is not available on the base model of PS5) and an output resolution of 4K. This will allow ray-traced reflections on opaque and transparent surfaces.
Performance mode, meanwhile, will not have ray tracing, but will feature 60 frames per second and a 4K output resolution. It will use roughly the same rendering settings (image quality) as the PS5's base quality mode.
“PS5 Pro's Performance Mode features significantly higher output resolution and has more visual detail compared to the base PS5,” Remedy explained. “Overall image stability, fog, volumetric lighting and shadow accuracy have been improved on the Pro.”
Remedy said that because Alan Wake 2 was so “incredibly detailed and rich” visually, it was “difficult for ray tracing, especially compared to our previous game, Control.” But the studio wanted to rise to the challenge, and the updated hardware the PS5 Pro provides made all the difference.
“With ray tracing effects, the details of the world in Alan Wake 2 can be seen more accurately than before on console, and the image is more stable in complex lighting situations,” the team wrote.
“We've always wanted to bring cutting-edge visuals to our games, but everything is always a balancing act between frame rate, visual quality, technical and hardware limitations, development resources and what we want to achieve artistically with the game “.
The studio noted that much of Alan Wake 2's setting benefits from ray tracing, but “it comes at a cost.”
Said remedy: “Each ray must be traced and its impact evaluated and shaded. Due to the nature of ray tracing, multiple rays must be traced to obtain noise-free images. Unfortunately, tracing and shading multiple rays per pixel is still generally too expensive We must be able to work with noisy images provided by low sample counts, which means we must remove noise by denoising When trying to achieve real-time performance, game engines like our own Northlight typically resort to using small images. sample counts and denoising.
“In a game like Alan Wake 2, its complex light-material interactions and rich environments can make the tracing, shading, and denoising of even a single ray tracing effect too expensive to justify the cost depending on the game. hardware”.
Remedy described Alan Wake 2 as a geometrically “very dense” game. “Using a GPU-driven rendering process and its detailed curation with GPU-executed skinning made it possible to create densely populated forest scenes with layers and layers of foliage and trees found during the Saga gameplay segments that take place. in lush environments of the Pacific Northwest,” he continues.
“While shading the main camera view can effectively eliminate most of the unnecessary work, uncompromising ray tracing must build an acceleration structure using a large portion of the objects in the scene, since the “Ray tracing goes beyond the limits of screen space information. The Pro's improved hardware made it possible to build acceleration structure for more densely populated scenes, which was the main limitation before.”
You can learn more about how Remedy updated Alan Wake 2 for PS5 Pro here.
In addition to today's PS5 Pro news, Remedy is also preparing to release its second expansion for Alan Wake 2, known as The Lake House.
The next expansion will be another piece of terror, with a new playable character and enemy type. Its launch is scheduled for tomorrow, October 22.