[MarkusRMD]

Hi all!

This post is meant to describe the graphics settings of Alan Wake in some detail, and tell how they affect performance.

RESOLUTION - Resolution can be adjusted freely based on what your graphics card / monitor tells our game it can do. The game supports different aspect ratios too. Increasing resolution is fairly GPU-heavy as the game also increases the resolution of many of the internal rendering buffers.

Alan Wake needs a minimum 1024x768 resolution to run. When you first run the game, it tries to run in your desktop resolution unless you have a very slow system (there is a very light-weight automatic performance detection on the first run).

If you have low performance we recommend you run the game at 1280x720 or 1024x768.


VSYNC - You can enable or disable the vertical sync. Disabling it causes the game to render "as fast as it can" meaning your frame rate may go up, but also will cause the game to "tear" and the frame rate to feel more uneven.


GRAPHICS QUALITY - Low, Medium, High or Custom. A few pre-defined settings for different performance levels.


ANTIALIASING - 2x, 4x, 8x - defines the full screen MSAA level. 8x is pretty expensive for the GPU. Best performance & visual compromise is 4x setting and FXAA set to high. Antialiasing can't be disabled in Alan Wake, as the engine has been designed so that AA is on at all times. If you disable it from e.g. driver's control panel, the game will likely work but you will see visual artifacts.


FXAA - Off, Low, High. FXAA is a complementary post-processing anti-alias technique. It's not really expensive, but should be turned off on low-end systems. High uses a slightly slower, better quality technique.


ANISOTROPIC FILTERING - Off, 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x - sets the texture filter mode. Makes the textures look sharper/nicer.


SHADOW QUALITY - Low, Medium, High. Low is meant for older, low end systems. This setting really affects CPU and GPU performance. Low renders one shadow region less and the shadow draw distance is small. Medium corresponds approximately to what the Xbox360 build does, and high has increased resolution and filtering.


SSAO Quality - Off, Low, High - Screen Space Ambient Occlusion is a post-processing effect that makes objects look like they fit better in the scene by shadowing the edges. Needs purely GPU power. High uses better quality effect and takes quite a lot of power, Low can look a bit noisy at times.


BACKDROP QUALITY - Low, Medium, High - affects the rendering quality of the game world's backdrop beyond draw distance (see below). A good compromise on a medium PC may be lowering draw distance but keeping this setting at medium or high, as the performance effect is not huge, but the Low quality backdrop can look a bit blocky.


GODRAY QUALITY - Off, High. God Rays from the sun are on only during daytime scenes. On a low end graphics card this can take a lot of performance for little visual benefit - it's a cool but rather subtle effect. This setting has no effect on performance or visuals during night time.


VOLUMETRIC LIGHT QUALITY - Low, High. Filtering and resolution of the Volumetric light effects in the game. This is a night time setting only. High makes lights look really pretty and is not massively expensive for the GPU to render.


DRAW DISTANCE - Slider that affects the landscape and object draw distance. It also affects the landscape tessellation distance which is a CPU intensive process. Minimum is 650m, max is 1500m during daytime and 1000m during night time. This slider has a large effect on CPU power in the game, but also affects GPU performance. Recommend turning to minimum for low end systems.


LOD DISTANCE - Slider that changes the distance when objects change from lower level of detail models to the high detail models. It also affects how far small objects are rendered. This can have a rather big impact on performance, both CPU and GPU power. Recommend turning to low on slow systems.


FOV (under control options) - Slider that affects the FOV factor compared to the default FOV. The FOV in the game is affected by aspect ratio as well as many in-game events (sprinting, boosting), thus this has to be a multiplier rather than a fixed angle setting. Our default FOV in 16:9 is about 80 degrees. Increasing the FOV requires more processing power both from the CPU and GPU - a larger area with possibly more visible objects is rendered.

-noblur COMMAND LINE OPTION
This option disables the vector blur in the game. While we think Alan Wake should be played with the blur on, we understand some gamers don't like it. Disabling blur gives a slight performance boost. Note: Initial release has a bug that turns the blur back on at some points in the game, this will be fixed in the first patch.


That's it! Hope this is helpful. It would be nice to add some detailed/cropped screen shots here to show the difference, maybe someone here could help us with those after launch and a moderator could put them up.

[BozzCollin]

Sweet, thanks Markus

[djshauny1]

Thank Markus

[Skip]

Thanks Markus! Hopefully this will cut down some of the 28653 questions you've been asked

[foda500]

I am fully prepared to give you cash Remedy.

[MarkusRMD]

How these were on the Xbox360 build:

Resolution - mix of 960x544 and 1280x720, and some things like fog particles were rendered in half resolution that are rendered in full on PC.

Vsync - Xbox had "smart vsync" i.e. Vsync on if frame rate above 30, and off if below 30. PC doesn't support a mode like this. American Nightmare Xbox360 btw has a selectable Vsync (on, off, smart).

Antialiasing and FXAA - We had 4xAA on Xbox. FXAA was added to American Nightmare.

Anisotropic Filtering - Some textures where it was important had Aniso on Xbox (like the road texture with the yellow line), most were trilinear filtered only.

Shadow Quality - Xbox360 is somewhere around the medium setting. The rendering differs a bit so no exact comparisons can be made.

SSAO Quality - Xbox360 build had something like the Low setting - maybe with a bit less noise.

Backdrop Quality - Xbox360 Alan Wake used Medium.

GodRay Quality - Xbox360 build had this turned to off except for some specific scenes where we had the performance to turn it on and had most visual impact. The quality was less than "High".

Volumetric Light Quality - Xbox used the "Low" setting.

Draw Distance - Xbox build had this at Full - it was mainly added as an optimization. Draw calls are way more expensive on the PC than they are on the Xbox360, and this reduces draw calls.

LOD Distance - Xbox build had this around the middle mark.

FOV - Middle / default is the one Xbox360 version used too.

[WakeLestat360]

Wait. I'm a dumb about these tech's terms... but are you saying that Alan Wake 1 on Xbox 360 uses VLQ (volumetric Light) on LOW? REALLY?

Come on, what epic lighting engine do you have in your hands Remedy?

[CocoNUT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by WakeLestat360

Wait. I'm a dumb about these tech's terms... but are you saying that Alan Wake 1 on Xbox 360 uses VLQ (volumetric Light) on LOW? REALLY?

Come on, what epic lighting engine do you have in your hands Remedy?

God works for Remedy. Didn't you know that?

[MarkusRMD]

Yeah, well, more strictly speaking it's only about how the shader filters / interpolates the volumetric light beams.

[Wane]

FXAA was added to American Nightmare? awesome sauce!

[Deimos]

A little question, could you add resolutions higher than the LCDs native resolution so we can use Downsampling?
It's nothing that breaks the game, but would be nice.

[koviprog]

hi team

a have the big problem, why can't change the resolution? just fix 1280x720 everything can change, only that setting's not don't increase and don't decrease? why? my desktop resolution is 1920x1080p 65" plasma television.

[frozenreads]

Great game, been dying to place this on the PC for some time. I have to say I have been a little disappointed with the performance so far on my machine. I have a GTX 580 OC'd to 870 running on an i7 @ 3.8ghz with 12gb ram and I have quite large frame rate dips. Volumetric light quality has a massive hit for me. Frame rates can drop as low as mid 40's in a lot of places even with conservative settings. This really does come across as a console port Im afraid. Great game though.

Update: Having really tested various graphic settings, I find the biggest hit by far is definitely Volumetric light quality with this set to low I get quite a large improvement in performance. I can max everything else out with this switched to low and get for the most part 60fps (vsync enabled)

Further update: The sweetest graphic settings I have found are SSAO Low, Volumetric light quality low, everything else, maxed, these seem to be the heavy performance hitters. I take back what i said, with these settings the game is running pretty sweet, absolutely awesome game

[CP69]

Any pics in difference between low and high settings ?

dunno about you guys but on my laptop (dx10) there seems to be very little difference except for the huge impact on the framerate.

[Jarkko]

Just one little cosmetic thing. In advanced options, there is just one more option behind arrow. Why not just show all settings at once.

[Adel2Alanwake]

When the patch fix is going to be released?

[dalegt4]

i presume i would only be able to run the game on minimum with my current laptop??

i can run Crysis 1 at 30-35fps on max details @ 1366 x 768

specs are win 7 64bit
second gen intel core i3 2330m
8gb ram
1gb 520m nvidia geforce
the game place website at top there says i could run the game, remedy guys what do you think?

i have it on the xbox but wouldnt mind it on pc too.

cheers

[Morry]

To give you an idea of performance, here's my setup:

Dell Inspiron N4050
Intel Core i5-2410M CPU @ 2.30Ghz
4Gb RAM
AMD HD 6470 M switchable with Mobile Intel HD graphics

With Low setting on 1280x720, I get about 20fps during daylight scenes and 16fps during night scenes. It may run ok with your setup, but you might not enjoy the experience.

[dalegt4]

thats a bugger.. oh well at lease i have the xbox!

mine has that switchable intel hd 3000 graphics too but only older games see to use it as the optimus always selects the geforce, bloody shame that it wont run well but hey ho! thanks!

[nikodimosi]

guys you must add motion blur On/Off

[Roarshack]

Quote:

Originally Posted by nikodimosi

guys you must add motion blur On/Off

There is -noblur.

[nikodimosi]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roarshack

There is -noblur.

-noblur. does not work

[Gr@M91]

Hi. First of all I want to thank Remedy for porting this masterpiece to PC=)
So about my problem:
I'm getting low fps on any graphical settings, I'm playing on a laptop,
here are my specs:
Asus N61ja
OS: Win7 - 64bit
CPU: Intel Core i5 520M 2,4 GHz
VGA: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5730 1Gb
Memory: 4gb
I have latest display drivers from AMD.

[dalegt4]

to be honest by the sounds it appears you need a beast of a system on the graphics card terms to play it at good graphics settings, i have 8gb of ram on my laptop and a 1 gig card yet am informed i would get low fps, a geforce 580 would be required for top performance i imagine. i shall know for next time i make my purchase of laptop to make sure i get the best gfx card! haha

[Bulbous]

I played for a few hours and my GPU heated up big time. I have a Radeon 6870. Everything looked fantastic, but I don't want to start a fire!

[Praetorian121]

MarkusRMD thank you for this graphic settings guide.

And REMEDY thank you for this amazing game.

[Lemonade]

You should think about running the game on a desktop computer. Every part of a laptop is meant to be power saving so the "same GPU" as a desktop one is less powerful.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nikodimosi

guys you must add motion blur On/Off

Do people want to disable Motion Blur for perfomance purposes? If no then why do people want to disable it? I like motion blur, you know, it's everywhere in real life. I always enable MT Framework's one.

[MrVVC]

Unfortunately i can't set the game in 800x600, as said in the release notes from first patch:
"Unofficial support for 640x480 and 800x600 resolution through command line".

When i add "-w800 -h600" in the command line (in steam) a popup is shown, that the game can't be run below 1024x768.
Same issue when i add the resolution of 800x600 in the resolution.xml file.

Thanks for any hints.

[ispaure]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dalegt4

thats a bugger.. oh well at lease i have the xbox!

mine has that switchable intel hd 3000 graphics too but only older games see to use it as the optimus always selects the geforce, bloody shame that it wont run well but hey ho! thanks!

LOL It's laughable you thinking the game wouldn't run on your computer XD. Any games runs on that configuration just fine I've got the same configuration (but 4gb of ram) and I'm playing Alan Wake for PC on med/high with acceptably good framerates (medium when outputing to a 1920x1080 monitor )

So you wont have any problems.

Take care

[Un1qu3]

first
thanks

second
I heard you are gonna release an offical patches that supports the low
res. like 800x600 and 640x480

can you release any thing that can make

multi sample anti aliasing off not at x2

cause every time I try to open the game

i see that error

multi sample anti aliasing is not supported with your GPU

so i hope you make a patch that can turn off the MSAA

and Ty for supporting the 640x480 and 800x600 res.

[Deimos]

@ MrVVC:
The patch isn't released yet. So it clearly won't work

@ Un1qu3:
MSAA is necessary, turning it off would cause glitches and other problems.
That's why there are minimal system requirements.

[Gr@M91]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dalegt4

to be honest by the sounds it appears you need a beast of a system on the graphics card terms to play it at good graphics settings, i have 8gb of ram on my laptop and a 1 gig card yet am informed i would get low fps, a geforce 580 would be required for top performance i imagine. i shall know for next time i make my purchase of laptop to make sure i get the best gfx card! haha

So you're saying that my laptop that runs id software's Rage on pretty high settings on 1366x768 with anti-aliasing switched on and showing 60 frames per second can't run Alan Wake on lowest settings without fps drops(lower than 25 frames per second) on 1024x768??? Not funny at all... I even get stable 30 frames while running Metro 2033 on medium settings...

[Un1qu3]

@ deimos

but it could be off

i ran all games on my PC even battlefield 3

and i cant run this game cause the MSAA

if anyone works on remedy could add this it will be better for me and lots of alan wake fans
who couldnot run the game because of this error

[CP69]

yeah , resolution can be changed now

played it smooth on my 4 year old laptop maxed out (only thing left at 2x is aa) at 840*400 (800 x 600 looks better but does not fit wel on a 16:10 laptop)

[drali]

i have intel hd graphics card but the problem is not resolution
error .msaa not supported with my graphics hardware
what can i do?
please

[Morry]

You need a dedicated graphics card. Intel HD graphics are just basic video cards that come shipped with motherboards. You will want a video card based on AMD or Nvidia to run the game effectively.

[drali]

but i bought my laptop 10 months ago.
core i5,4g ram
is there any thing i can do with the configuration of the card like raising the memory of the card??

[CP69]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Un1qu3

@ deimos

but it could be off

i ran all games on my PC even battlefield 3

and i cant run this game cause the MSAA

if anyone works on remedy could add this it will be better for me and lots of alan wake fans
who couldnot run the game because of this error

can"T you turn it off (msaa) ?

i know it can be turned off in-game , but in a cfg file i dunno.

edit. sorry , my bad ....
FXAA can be turned off in-game

anyway , just wait for a fix to turn off AA completely.
latest update made you change resolution to lower settings , so fingers crossed the next one will turn off AA if you want to.

[Un1qu3]

please Remedy in the next week Patch
add something can make MSAA off

I can't launch the Game

[drali]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Un1qu3

please Remedy in the next week Patch
add something can make MSAA off

I can't launch the Game

yeah please remedy do it because i have the same problem to launch the game