I know this is somewhat of a "gamer" question, but there are a lot of technically inclined people on this site, and I'm not sure how many of you play recent games, but I'm having an issue with the latest release...

Basically I"m having pretty severe issues, the game is stuttering/lagging. It Starts off running smoothly (I have it on the lowest settings) but then it's extremely laggy when the FBI agent starts walking through the woods (aka 10 or so mins into the game).

These are my specs I Have a legion 5 laptop AMD Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics 2.90 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, 16 GB RAM... I'm wondering is there anything I can do to play this game or improve the performance? I purchased my laptop in 2021.... I can't believe it's "outdated" already and I struggle playing a modern title like alan wake 2... Insane to upgrade my pc just for one game, so im wondering if due to how demanding the title is, I won't be able to play it, and I just wasted 70 bucks....

 

If you bought the game from steam, you can probably request a refund and call it a day.

 

6gb of VRAM might be your answer.

 

What did you expect? Remedy games have always been tech showcases and pretty hardware hungry. Try a powerful desktop PC with an RTX 3070 or higher. Then you should be able to play reasonably smoothly on medium graphics settings.

 

I have 6GB of VRAM.... I wonder if I should just upgrade my laptop.... that or get a better PC, just my laptop is basically new (got it in 2021)... Don't really feel like spending another 1000

 

That's just Nvidia's fault, to be honest. They keep releasing GPUs that are VRAM starved to this day. I'm about to buy a 4070 (ti or not), and it's only 12gb in a world where 8gb is now considered the minimum and 16gb the safe choice for the next 3 or so years. You have a decent PC, but Alan Wake II is a very punishing game to run, just like Control was a few years ago. Give it 2 or 3 years and GPUs that can run it maxed out will be common. Right now, I wouldn't consider an upgrade if you're happy with what you already have. No shame in getting a PS5 or a Series X if you really care about playing asap.

 

Laptop GPUs are almost always underclocked, a laptop is rarely a sensible investment for playing new games.

I don't think you can get by on 1000 bucks. Unless 1000 is the budget just for a GPU.

Consoles are a cheap alternative...

 

I mean theyre posted the hardware requirements.

 

You can also go for a Cloudgaming Service like GeForceNow or Shadow, but you will need a fast internet connection for it.

By the Way Minimum Specs RTX2060 is crazy in my Opinion, but thats the Way it is nowadays. GTA5 was nice Specswise for the Graphics it had.

 

Last edited: Oct 29, 2023

you knew the requirements, you could have watched/read reviews and benchmarks, you shouldn't have bought such shitty unoptimized game

only thing which may save you is AMD's FSR 3 upscaling, but I have no experience with that yet

 

Lmao, it's not unoptimized. The game works fine and scales great with hardware. People these days think that anything that doesn't run on their machines is unoptimized. Min specs GPU is a nearly 5-year-old card that is 30% slower than current hardware at the same price range.

 

You may have bought your laptop in 2021 but its definitely older. I bought mine in 2021 too but it had a 3060. Im running AW2 at a steady 60 fps @ 1080 but with DLSS on quality tho

 

I want to thank you all for your replies, and advice. Honestly, this community is insanely helpful for a lot of issues! I should have looked at the specs, it was just an impulse buy because the VERY first video game I ever played was Alan wake 1 in my life. So now years later, I wanted the sequel. I'll get a refund from EPIC on the PC version, reset up my TV and Xbox and buy the Xbox version....

perhaps will buy a better PC gaming setup in the near future, but I got the Lenovo since I wanted a stellar gaming laptop that could also handle heavy music production requirements.

 

im a PC gamer as well......PC gaming requires responsibility some games are known to not be unoptimized for pc choose wisely do your research before buying very simple

 

Last edited: Oct 29, 2023

its a give and take you have all type of configurations when it comes to PC gaming but on consoles its the same configuration so you will run into some issues every now and then on PC no matter
how good your hardware is or bad it is

 

I'm getting sick of seeing games requiring DLSS/FSR to be even playable at 1080p,
official reqs say RTX 3070 at performance upscaling which means gpu renders at 960x540p !!!

 

Games are all over the place. I don't think it "sounds" particularly optimised but I haven't tried it yet.
My specs probably aren't going to expose anything though. When my machine sees a game running poorly, and some have, blame has to go back to the developers at some point. I have a 2023 high spec (not stupid 4090 high because that's just insulting but high enough). If a game is released and runs like a dog on this then that's on the developer. Yes Nvidia is releasing GPUs and skimping on VRAM that would cost them close to nothing considering the prices they're charging but developers must develop for the hardware that's out there - not the hardware they wish was out there.

 

Define "optimized." You can only optimize the execution time of code blocks, the screen render and object steaming. Everything else is a qualitative compromise. Reducing objects, disabling graphical effects, fallback systems like low resolution textures/assets or supersampling. You can hardly ask a developer to make more compromises than he is willing to make, just so that every player can "play" the game on every pc configuration. And DLSS is a good way for such an atmospheric game to reduce as few objects and effects as possible that create the atmosphere of the game, since low latency is not so important here.

Alan Wake 2 is currently unplayable on its highest graphics settings in high native resolution, even on an RTX 4090. This is not the "fault" of the developers, but is "normal" for graphically ambitious games. A few examples I can think of off the top of my head where it was pretty much the same are Far Cry, Crysis, Doom 3, Half Life 2, etc. And also some of Remedy's previous games. Some games could only be maxed out with next generation hardware. For some games, it even took until the generation after next to really max them out and get frame rates of 60FPS. What most of these games have in common is that they age quite well.

 

A GeForce GTX 1660 Ti (laptop version) is more or less equivalent to a GTX 980 desktop.

People always think that mobile GPU are equivalent to desktop GPU because they have the same name ... this is the biggest scam of the GPU industry.

No wonder why you cant play this game even at 720p low.

 

I used to do game development for a while so here's the thing:
years back, devs actually DID care about optimization, because they were limited by storage (game would have to fit on a CD, DVD etc..) and computing power of computers,

in static level design it was very common objects next to walls were not casting shadows because you couldn't see them, models of objects were baked at multiple variants of different mesh complexity to save processing power when rendered at longer distances, effects, animations, reflections etc.. were limited to actual visible screen space, textures were universally shared across various objects and baked at multiple different resolutions..... I could continue with thousands of examples like that,

nowadays, publisher dictates what game is supposed to look like (because that's what sells) while devs don't even know limitations of a third-party game engine they're working with, even switching engines mid-project,

how is possible new Baldur's Gate III requirements are so low,
but for ex. new Cities Skylines II can't even run at RTX 4090 - you tell me it's a compromise devs made? then f*ck them, sorry.

or take a look at for ex. Assassin's Creed Unity from 2014, looks better than this years' AC Mirage, despite lower requirements, interesting right?