There was a lot of disappointment earlier this month when Remedy’s Leah-Newin said the game would require DX12 Ultimate and Mesh Shaders. And since Remedy just lifted the review embargo on Alan Wake 2, it can finally be confirmed that the game won’t prevent you from running it on older/unsupported GPUs. In fact, the game was able to run on the NVIDIA GTX980Ti.
When you first run the game on older/unsupported GPUs, you will receive the following warning message. Yes, the game requires Mesh Shaders for optimal performance. Remedy’s Leah-Newin wasn’t lying about this. However, this will not prevent you from running it.
So here’s how the game runs at 1080p/max settings/no ray tracing on an NVIDIA GTX980Ti. So yes, although Alan Wake 2 runs on this old video card, it cannot be called playable. There were also crashes when trying to change the resolution.
In addition, there are serious visual glitches with this configuration. This should not come as a surprise since they were mentioned in the warning message. So here’s a nice screenshot showing these glitches.
Essentially, this means that yes, you will be able to run Alan Wake 2 on NVIDIA 10-series and AMD 5000-series. However, performance will not be optimal and you may experience numerous visual glitches.
It should also be noted that Alan Wake 2 does not use Denuvo’s tamper-proof technology.
