Remedy has revealed and elaborated on the optimizations they have made for Alan Wake 2 on PlayStation 5 Pro.
As we had hypothesized, Remedy achieved 4K 60 FPS on the console via upscaling. They are using the render resolution of 1536 x 864, which is close to Alan Wake 2’s resolution on Quality mode in the base PlayStation 5.
The PlayStation 5 Pro will then output the game at a resolution of 3840 x 2160, a clear improvement from the 1440p output on the base PlayStation 5.
Remedy also shared some insights on the difficulties they had in making this happen:
“Increasing the internal rendering resolution consumes a lot of processing power, no matter how powerful your hardware is.
However, in our experiments, even putting all the added power to increased rendering resolution provided a barely noticeable difference in the output image or its quality.
Adding more pixels to gain visual quality is not straightforward with the new AI-based upscaling methods.
That being said, there still is a threshold on what resolution image you can feed to modern upscalers and expect good quality reconstruction results.
Many different parameters affect the upscaling quality, ranging from the style of content to the choice of rendering algorithms that are used to produce the image.
Every engine and artistic direction works in different ways.”
4K 60FPS has been a heavy burden that weighed down both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S since both consoles launched. Both Sony and Microsoft marketed the idea that the consoles could make games perform at this level.
The thing is, that claim is factually correct. Unfortunately for both companies, developers ended up prioritizing other performance goals, such as ray tracing.
As Remedy has pointed out, raising the output resolution doesn’t show enough of an improvement in their game’s graphics. They are more enthusiastic about ray tracing, which does bring improvements to graphics that can be plainly seen by anyone.
So, for those who are interested, Remedy also managed to implement ray tracing for Alan Wake 2 on Quality Mode on the PlayStation 5 Pro. There will be both opaque and transparent ray traced reflections.
However, ray tracing is a significantly heavy workload on the new console. So, Alan Wake 2 on Quality Mode on the PlayStation 5 Pro will run at 30 FPS. It will also upscale the resolution, from a render resolution of 2176 x 1224, to an output resolution of 3840 x 2160.
Remedy has also made good on their promise to share assets demonstrating what they have achieved, with a link to uncompressed screenshots you can find here.
We hope this will help Alan Wake 2 move forward to profitability from possible PlayStation 5 Pro sales. But we understand most gamers are looking for proof that the new console will or will not live up to Sony’s promises. Consider this a first look at what PlayStation 5 Pro enhancements will be like.
You can watch a video demonstrating Alan Wake 2 with that upscaled 4k 60 FPS below.
