If you are using a graphics card older than Nvidia’s RTX 20 or AMD Radeon RX 6000 series, you will need to upgrade if you want to.
The big picture: A Remedy developer raised alarms upon admitting that Alan Wake 2 doesn’t officially support graphics cards older than Turing and RDNA 2. Early post-launch testing shows that GPUs predating mesh shaders will still boot the game but with generally unacceptable performance. For example, cards like the Radeon RX 5700 XT and GeForce GTX 1080 Ti fare far worse than weaker GPUs from later generations.
If you are using a graphics card older than Nvidia’s RTX 20 or AMD Radeon RX 6000 series, you will need to upgrade if you want to play the PC version of Alan Wake 2 – even if it’s an enthusiast-tier model. Benchmarks following the game’s launch have uncovered why and explain the somewhat shocking system requirements.
According to the spec sheet, Alan Wake 2 requires an RTX 2060 or Radeon RX 6600 at the absolute minimum. Someone with a GTX 1080 Ti or Radeon 5700 XT might surmise that those GPUs can handle the game because the aging flagships perform similarly to their mainstream successors in most other titles. However, Alan Wake 2 isn’t like most other games.
Shortly before launch, a Remedy developer explained that the game doesn’t officially run on GPUs that lack mesh shader support.
