Alan Wake 2 — best graphics settings (2026)

Typical impact 0-5% · 3% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Texture Quality at Medium (3% fps cost).

Controls the maximum mipmap resolution loaded for surface textures. Higher levels stream larger texture maps (2K/4K) from disk into VRAM via the texture streaming pool. The GPU samples these during fragment shading using the currently bound sampler state. The FPS cost is minimal when VRAM is sufficient because texture fetch latency is hidden by the cache hierarchy, but exceeding VRAM capacity triggers page-faulting and hitching as textures are swapped between system RAM and VRAM.

In Alan Wake 2: Northlight streams textures into a dedicated VRAM pool; Low uses compressed 1K/2K assets while High loads full 4K surface maps for environments and character detail. In VRAM-limited scenarios (8 GB at 1440p or above), High can trigger stalling as path-traced render targets compete with texture pages. Keep at Medium if you are near the VRAM ceiling — the visual difference in dark forest scenes is small but matters in the Bright Falls interiors.

Typical impact 8-25% · 8% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Shadow Quality at Medium (8% fps cost).

Controls shadow map resolution, filtering method, and cascade count for dynamic shadows. The engine renders the scene from each light source perspective into depth-only shadow map textures. Higher settings increase shadow map resolution (1024 to 4096 texels), add more cascaded shadow map splits for the directional light (improving near-field resolution), and enable softer PCF or PCSS filtering which requires more depth comparison samples per pixel during the lighting pass.

In Alan Wake 2: This setting governs rasterised shadow map resolution and cascade count and is only meaningful when Ray Tracing is set to Off or Low, where conventional shadow maps are still in use. At High RT mode, shadow maps are bypassed entirely and shadow_quality has minimal effect. On rasterised paths, Low cuts cascade resolution aggressively, producing visible shadow acne on tree geometry in the forest chapters.

Typical impact 20-50% · no measurable cost

In Alan Wake 2, the recommended preset leaves Ray Tracing off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Enables hardware-accelerated ray tracing via DXR or Vulkan RT extensions, dispatching rays from the GPU RT cores through a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) acceleration structure built over scene geometry. Depending on the implementation, RT may cover reflections (tracing reflection rays from glossy surfaces), shadows (tracing shadow rays toward light sources for pixel-perfect hard/soft shadows), ambient occlusion (short-range visibility rays), and global illumination (multi-bounce path tracing). Each feature adds its own ray budget — a single pixel might dispatch 1-8 rays. BVH traversal and ray-triangle intersection testing occur on dedicated RT hardware, but shading the hit points runs on standard compute units.

In Alan Wake 2: Northlight engine in AW2 uses path tracing for ALL lighting when RT is on High/Ultra. This is the most demanding RT implementation in any game — even RTX 4090 needs DLSS Performance at 4K.

Typical impact 15-40% · 8% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Global Illumination at Medium (8% fps cost).

The most comprehensive indirect lighting system, simulating full multi-bounce light transport. Modern implementations include UE5 Lumen (software screen-space radiance cache with optional hardware RT acceleration), path tracing (stochastic ray tracing with multiple bounces per pixel), and hybrid systems combining screen-space probes with signed distance field tracing. Lumen software mode uses a screen-space radiance cache updated via compute shaders plus SDF traces, while hardware RT mode dispatches actual ray tracing calls through RT cores. This is typically the single heaviest setting in any game.

In Alan Wake 2: AW2's flashlight mechanics interact with GI — higher settings create more realistic light bounce in dark forest scenes. Core to the horror atmosphere.

Typical impact 3-20% · 6% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Reflection Quality at Medium (6% fps cost).

Controls the method and fidelity of surface reflections. Low settings use pre-baked cubemap probes — a single texture lookup per pixel. Medium enables screen-space reflections (SSR) that ray-march through the depth buffer to find reflected geometry. High uses higher-resolution SSR with more march steps. Ultra may enable planar reflections (re-rendering the scene from a mirrored viewpoint) or RT reflections (hardware-accelerated rays). The cost escalation from cubemaps to SSR to RT is dramatic — cubemaps are nearly free, SSR costs 3-8%, and RT reflections cost 15-25%.

In Alan Wake 2: At Off/Low, reflections fall back to static cubemap probes captured offline. Medium introduces screen-space reflections ray-marched through the Hi-Z depth buffer, which are visible on Saga's car hood and puddles in the forest. High enables hardware RT mirror reflections via dedicated reflection rays. In path-tracing mode, reflections are solved as part of the full transport simulation and this setting is superseded — setting it lower saves nothing when RT is on High, so pair it with a reduced RT level to see benefit.

Typical impact 5-18% · 10% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Volumetric Fog at Medium (10% fps cost).

Renders physically-based 3D fog that interacts with lighting, shadows, and participating media density. The engine allocates a 3D froxel (frustum-voxel) volume texture — typically 160x90x64 or higher — and ray-marches through it from each pixel, accumulating scattered light and extinction at each step. Each froxel samples the shadow map to determine direct illumination, applies the Henyey-Greenstein phase function for anisotropic scattering, and accumulates density from noise textures or analytical fog volumes. The cost is substantial because every visible pixel requires a full volumetric integration.

In Alan Wake 2: Northlight evaluates fog in a 3D froxel volume that is sampled and shadowed per-step in both rasterised and path-traced modes. The Dark Place sequences — particularly the Overlap segments — fill the froxel grid with dense animated fog volumes that scatter the flickering practical lights. Off removes the froxel pass entirely at significant visual cost to atmosphere. High increases froxel resolution to roughly 256x144x128, producing fine-grained light shafts from Alan's flashlight in the fog. This is a heavy compute pass even without RT.

Typical impact 3-10% · 5% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Fog Quality at Medium (5% fps cost).

Controls the resolution and sample quality of fog rendering. Higher settings increase the froxel grid resolution for volumetric fog, add more ray march steps per pixel for denser integration, and improve the temporal stability filter quality. In engines using analytical fog (height fog, distance fog), this controls the number of fog layers and whether fog interacts with shadow maps for shadowed fog volumes. The cost is predominantly ALU-bound — more integration steps mean more compute shader invocations per froxel cell.

In Alan Wake 2: The Dark Place sequences use extremely dense volumetric fog that interacts with the flashlight. Unique to Northlight — higher settings create more realistic light scattering.

Typical impact 3-12% · 5% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Ambient Occlusion at Medium (5% fps cost).

Computes soft shadowing in crevices and where surfaces meet by estimating how much ambient light is occluded at each pixel. SSAO samples the depth buffer in a hemisphere around each pixel, testing for nearby occluders. HBAO+ uses ray-marching along the depth buffer horizon. GTAO uses a multi-directional horizon search with cosine-weighted integration for physically correct results. Each method runs as a fullscreen compute or pixel shader pass — higher quality modes increase sample count from 4 (SSAO) to 32+ (GTAO Ultra), directly scaling the per-pixel ALU cost.

In Alan Wake 2: When Ray Tracing is Off, AO is resolved via a screen-space horizon-based pass (HBAO-style) at a resolution determined by this setting. High uses a 32-sample multi-directional horizon search with temporal accumulation; Low drops to 8 samples with a heavier spatial blur. In the Dark Place's tight indoor sets and the cluttered Bright Falls sheriff's office, the AO contribution is visually significant. At High RT (path tracing), short-range visibility rays solve AO implicitly and this setting's GPU cost approaches zero.

Typical impact 3-12% · 4% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Level of Detail (LOD) at Medium (4% fps cost).

Governs the distance thresholds at which objects transition between LOD tiers. The engine uses screen-space projected size or distance-based heuristics to swap between high-poly and simplified meshes. Higher settings push these transition distances further, keeping detailed geometry on screen longer. This increases total triangle count, draw calls, and vertex buffer memory. In UE5 titles using Nanite, this controls the aggressiveness of the virtual geometry streaming system.

In Alan Wake 2: Northlight uses distance-based LOD thresholds for environment mesh clusters and foliage cards. Higher settings keep detailed tree and undergrowth meshes visible further into the Cauldron Lake forest, preventing noticeable geometry pop as Saga moves through the trees. The cost is increased vertex buffer throughput and more draw calls passing frustum culling at range. In the linear Dark Place segments, LOD has less impact since geometry density is controlled tightly, making it a better trade-off to lower here versus the open forest chapters.

Typical impact 3-10% · 3% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Post-Process Quality at Medium (3% fps cost).

Controls the overall quality of the fullscreen post-processing effect stack including tone mapping, color grading (LUT application), bloom (bright-pass filter with multi-stage Gaussian blur), lens flare, auto-exposure (luminance histogram compute shader), and screen-space lens distortion. Higher settings run these effects at full resolution, use larger blur kernels for bloom, and enable additional effects. The total cost is the sum of multiple fullscreen passes — each reading and writing the entire framebuffer.

In Alan Wake 2: Governs the Northlight post-processing stack: HDR tone mapping, per-frame auto-exposure via luminance histogram compute, lens bloom from bright light sources (the flashlight, TV screens, and ritual site lights), and the film-grain overlay that contributes to Alan Wake 2's cinematic aesthetic. High runs every pass at full resolution with a wide bloom kernel. Low halves bloom resolution and reduces blur pass iterations. The cost is modest — this is not a primary FPS lever — but disabling or lowering bloom visibly reduces the dreamy glow around in-game TV screens and Saga's torch.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Alan Wake 2, the recommended preset leaves NVIDIA DLSS off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Deep Learning Super Sampling — NVIDIA's AI-based temporal upscaling that runs on dedicated Tensor Core hardware. The engine renders at a lower internal resolution and feeds the reduced-resolution frame, motion vectors, and depth buffer to a neural network that reconstructs a high-resolution output. DLSS 3+ adds optical flow-based frame generation on Ada/Blackwell architectures. The FPS gain comes from rendering fewer pixels — Quality mode renders ~67% of native pixels, Performance ~50%, Ultra Performance ~33%.

In Alan Wake 2: Alan Wake 2 supports DLSS 3.5 including Ray Reconstruction, which replaces the standard denoiser on path-traced frames with a Tensor Core neural network trained specifically to reconstruct noisy RT signals. This is particularly valuable here because path tracing at any reasonable ray budget produces visibly noisy raw output — Ray Reconstruction significantly improves temporal stability of indirect lighting and reflections compared to the default denoiser. Quality mode (67% render scale) is the recommended minimum for path tracing; Performance mode (50%) is necessary at 4K on RTX 40-series.

Typical impact -25-70% · no measurable cost

In Alan Wake 2, the recommended preset leaves AMD FSR off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

FidelityFX Super Resolution — AMD's upscaling technology available on all GPUs. FSR 2.0+ uses temporal accumulation similar to TAA — it combines multiple jittered lower-resolution frames using motion vectors and a depth buffer to reconstruct a higher-resolution output via a multi-pass compute shader pipeline. The pipeline includes depth clip detection, motion vector dilation, luminance instability detection, and a reconstruction pass with Lanczos-based resampling. Unlike DLSS, FSR runs on standard compute units rather than dedicated AI hardware, working vendor-agnostically.

In Alan Wake 2: Alan Wake 2 implements FSR 2.2, giving non-NVIDIA hardware a temporal upscaling path that uses motion vectors and depth to reconstruct resolution from a reduced render scale. On AMD RDNA 3 or Intel Arc GPUs where DLSS is unavailable, FSR Quality (67% render scale) provides meaningful frame-time relief especially in the forest sections. FSR does not include a path-tracing-specific denoiser equivalent to DLSS Ray Reconstruction, so the raw path-traced image it upscales will carry more residual noise in dark areas than the DLSS equivalent.

Typical impact -30-80% · no measurable cost

In Alan Wake 2, the recommended preset leaves Frame Generation off — little visual loss for the frames it returns.

Synthesizes entirely new intermediate frames between real rendered frames using optical flow analysis. DLSS Frame Generation (NVIDIA Ada+) uses the Optical Flow Accelerator hardware to compute per-pixel motion between consecutive frames, then a neural network generates a synthetic frame by warping and blending the two surrounding real frames. AMD FSR Frame Generation uses a software-based optical flow compute shader implementation. The generated frame is inserted between real frames, effectively doubling perceived framerate. The trade-off is approximately 1 frame of additional display latency and potential artifacts on fast-moving objects where optical flow estimation fails.

In Alan Wake 2: Uses DLSS 3 Frame Generation on NVIDIA Ada (RTX 40-series) architecture, inserting AI-synthesised frames between real rendered frames using Optical Flow Accelerator hardware. In Alan Wake 2, where GPU frame times are exceptionally high even at reduced RT settings, frame generation can effectively double perceived framerate. Latency is managed via NVIDIA Reflex, which the game supports natively. Most impactful when base frame rate is already 40-50 fps — generating frames from a 25 fps base produces artefacts on fast flashlight swings and sprinting movement.

Typical impact 1-5% · 2% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Motion Blur at High (2% fps cost).

Applies directional blur to moving objects based on per-pixel motion vectors. The engine writes a motion vector buffer during the G-buffer pass — each pixel stores a 2D velocity derived from the difference between current and previous frame positions. The post-process shader samples the color buffer along each pixel's motion vector, averaging multiple taps to produce directional streaking. The cost is a single fullscreen pass with 8-16 dependent texture fetches per pixel. Many competitive players disable this for image clarity.

In Alan Wake 2: Applied as a per-object and per-camera velocity pass in Northlight's post-processing chain, sampling the motion vector buffer with 8–16 taps along each pixel's velocity vector. Alan Wake 2's cinematic third-person camera makes motion blur a legitimate part of the intended presentation during chase sequences and combat dodges. High increases tap count and blur length; Low uses fewer taps with a shorter maximum velocity. The FPS cost is minimal — the main reason to disable it is preference for a sharper image during combat rather than meaningful performance gain.

Typical impact 2-8% · 1% fps cost

In Alan Wake 2, we recommend Depth of Field at On (1% fps cost).

Simulates camera lens focus by blurring pixels based on their distance from a focal plane. The depth buffer is sampled to determine each pixel's circle of confusion (CoC). A Gaussian or bokeh blur is applied with kernel size proportional to CoC. Higher quality modes use physically-based hexagonal or circular bokeh shapes via a gather pass. Cinematic mode may use separate near-field and far-field blur with smooth transitions. The cost scales with maximum CoC radius — large blur kernels require 32+ texture taps per pixel.

In Alan Wake 2: Northlight uses a physically-based CoC-based DoF with separate near and far field blur, most visible during cutscenes and the frequent over-the-shoulder dialogue sequences. The bokeh shape is circular and gather-based, requiring multiple texture taps per pixel proportional to blur radius. In gameplay, DoF is subtle but present on close-range flashlight beam focus. Disabling it removes the cinematic focus-pull in story sequences but has only a minor frame-time effect — toggle Off if you prefer an always-sharp gameplay image rather than for performance reasons.