{"id":56,"date":"2022-01-19T14:53:54","date_gmt":"2022-01-19T14:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engadget.vip\/?p=56"},"modified":"2022-01-19T14:53:54","modified_gmt":"2022-01-19T14:53:54","slug":"alan-wake-remastered-tech-review-the-dark-half","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"Alan Wake Remastered tech review \u2014 The Dark Half"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>

Alan Wake Remastered<\/em> is now out on PC almost ten entire years after the original debuted on the platform. It brings with it upgraded character models, textures, and lightning. As it\u2019s a better-looking game, you might not be able to run it quite as well as you were the last time around. We\u2019re going to look at what this new release\u2019s PC options are, as well as compare what sort of differences they make. Let\u2019s look at the specs, shall we?<\/p>\n

Minimum:<\/strong><\/p>\n

CPU:\u00a0 i5-3340<\/p>\n

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 or AMD Equivalent. 2GB VRAM.<\/p>\n

RAM: 8 GB<\/p>\n

Recommended:<\/strong><\/p>\n

CPU: i7-3770<\/p>\n

GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Equivalent. 4GB VRAM<\/p>\n

RAM: 16 GB<\/p>\n

Reviewer:<\/strong><\/p>\n

CPU: Ryzen 3 2600x<\/p>\n

GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT<\/p>\n

RAM: 16 GB<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

As you can see, those recommended specs are quite a bit higher than your usual garden variety remaster. Alan Wake Remastered\u00a0<\/em>demands four times as much RAM as the game did back in 2010. Granted, a decade is a long time, but the original game still looks good. For me, the performance isn\u2019t great, but it\u2019s serviceable, as I\u2019m able to average about 60 fps. Sometimes it shoots up to the 70s, other times I\u2019ll briefly get over 100 fps indoors. It varies pretty wildly. As this is built on the bones of such an old game, I really don\u2019t see why any of this has to happen, but what do I know? Next, let\u2019s look at the graphics options.<\/p>\n

\"Unknown<\/p>\n

Yeah, I turned off the film grain. Sue me. Okay, I\u2019d rather you didn\u2019t do that, actually, but you know what I mean. If you turn v-sync off, it locks the game to 60 fps, not your monitor\u2019s refresh rate.<\/p>\n

\"Unknown<\/p>\n

Three types of anti-aliasing, eh? At this point, no one should ever be using FXAA. Anisotropic filtering goes up to 16x, but I like to keep this at eight due to the performance impact. There\u2019s no general setting for texture quality, just terrain, so you can\u2019t revert to the old textures if you\u2019d rather have the fps. Honestly, if fps is paramount to you, you\u2019ll want to stick to the old version. There aren\u2019t many options here, so there\u2019s not a whole lot to be done if you\u2019re getting worse performance than you\u2019d like. Most of these don\u2019t drive the fps down individually either, so you\u2019d need be tuning down across the board. Let\u2019s look at some comparison screens.<\/p>\n

\"Terrain<\/p>\n

Terrain Quality Low<\/p>\n

\"Terrain<\/p>\n

Terrain Quality High<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Volumetric<\/p>\n

Volumetric Lights Low<\/p>\n

\"Volumetric<\/p>\n

Volumetric Lights High<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Shadow<\/p>\n

Shadow Quality Low<\/p>\n

\"Shadow<\/p>\n

Shadow Quality High<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Draw<\/p>\n

Draw Distance Min<\/p>\n

\"Draw<\/p>\n

Draw Distance Max<\/p>\n

If those are hard to see, there was no way I was using daytime shots for\u00a0Alan Wake Remastered <\/em>as pretty much the whole thing plays out at night. It\u2019s kind of hard to tell the difference between shots, as it isn\u2019t even super obvious when in-game. As for controls, you can play on m\/kb or gamepad. M\/kb is completely rebindable, and since there\u2019s so much shooting in this game, that\u2019s the best way to play it.<\/p>\n

Overall, I\u2019m not sure how much interest there\u2019ll be for this game on PC, since almost everyone interested got it a long time ago. It\u2019s even been discounted on Steam for quite some time. Plus, it was free on the EGS, so I\u2019m sure most folks have the game. Either way, this is a great looking remaster, even if performance isn\u2019t perfect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Wake Remastered is now out on PC almost ten entire years after the original debuted on the platform. It brings with it upgraded character models, textures, and lightning. As it\u2019s a better-looking game, you might not be able to run it quite as well as you were the last time around. We\u2019re going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[47,48,49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/57"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/engadget.vip\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}