Alan Wake 2 did it in spring list of the best graphics of the year 2023so how does the game hold up now that it sees a full PS5 Pro drop?

After all, the PS5 version was already one impressive technical showcasebut it had its limitations – including image quality issues inherent in low-res FSR 2 upscaling and some of the ray-traced elements of the PC version. Does the PS5 Pro solve these problems by adding RT and PSSR upscaling? And can it come close to the PC release, with its advanced RT feature set and DLSS upscaling?

Let’s start with the quality mode, which we tended to recommend on the base PS5 thanks to its better image quality and more advanced visuals, although performance sometimes falls below the 30fps ceiling. The PS5 Pro version adds RT reflections, which are missing on the amateur PS5, which are most evident on surfaces such as water or glass and look significantly more realistic than the hybrid SSR and SDF solution on the base console, with fewer visual errors and less noise.

Shadow filtering also seems to have improved slightly, and other settings don’t seem to have changed from PS5 to PS5 Pro. This means there are no RT shadows or RTAO like in the PC version, but RT reflections are probably the best value upgrade so their choice for the PS5 Pro version makes sense.

Alan Wake 2 also uses the PSSR upscaler on the PS5 Pro, which we expect to improve image quality. The original PS5 edition uses FSR 2 with a base resolution of 1270p, while the PS5 Pro edition is actually slightly lower at 1224p internally. We generally feel that the PSSR is a better upscaler than the FSR 2, but the results here are mixed at best. There is more image instability with the PS5 Pro in stills and it almost looks like a film grain is overlaid on the image, even though film grain and other post-processing effects were disabled in the menu before testing.

In motion, PSR looks better overall, with fewer disocclusion artifacts and better handling of fine details, such as Saga’s hair. But it also struggles with some elements that FSR 2 handles well, such as rendering thin power lines when moving forward. We don’t normally recommend this, but it’s worth disabling motion blur in quality mode on the PS5 Pro, as this seems to result in extra aliasing during camera movements.

So it’s a bit of a mixed bag there – better quality graphics, but some image quality and anti-aliasing. The good news is that quality mode improves performance in the most demanding areas of the game, the leafy forest scenes that dropped to the mid-20s on PS5. These aren’t perfect on the PS5 Pro, but the occasional frame drops in these areas are much less obtrusive overall.

Moving to the 60fps performance mode, this mode had a noticeably smooth resolution on the base PS5 with an internal resolution of 847p at its lowest. This isn’t much improved on the PS5 Pro through the use of PSSR upscaling, with a similar 864p internal resolution and similar blurry results. As before, image instability is a problem when stationary, although artifacts from disocclusion are less obvious in motion. The good news is that the settings have been bumped up to roughly the same level as the old quality mode, including blade density, volumetric light resolution, and distance shadow rendering.

As for frame rates, the original performance mode ran at 55-60 fps in forested areas and was generally 60 fps elsewhere. The game actually runs worse on the PS5 Pro, generally being ~3fps slower in forested scenes, although it remains above the 48fps threshold that determines whether VRR monitors can handle the drop below 60fps.

It’s a bit of a disappointment given the Pro’s improved RT acceleration, nicer upscaling and bigger GPU overall, and perhaps suggests that keeping the settings the same while increasing the internal resolution further might have yielded better results.

Aside from being a great game in its own right, Alan Wake 2 also provides a good opportunity to compare PSSR to DLSS at similar settings and internal resolutions, something we’ve only been able to do with Insomniac titles like Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart before now. Alan Wake 2 is particularly interesting because it uses the maximum 2.5x scaling offered by PSSR (864p to 2160p) and does not use dynamic resolution scaling in its consolidation, unlike Ratchet and Clank.

We installed an RTX 4070 PC with a custom 864p resolution and the Ultra Performance scaling mode preset using the Nvidia Profile Inspector tool. Here, both upscalers struggled with the low internal resolution, but DLSS was more temporally stable and better rendered sub-pixel details, such as the links in a distant chain-link fence. This is more apparent when the camera is still, with more jitter or film-grain-like artifacts in the PSSR image, but in motion, DLSS also does better in terms of aliasing and flickering. Some on-screen effects like SSAO, volumetrics or SSR also seem more unstable in PSSR than in DLSS or even FSR 2.

Nevertheless, PSSR is still early in its development, and there is room for it to improve beyond FSR 2 and begin to approach DLSS in quality. We’ve already seen it perform better in Insomniac’s output, so it might not mesh as well with Alan Wake 2’s more realistic style yet.

Alan Wake 2 also offers an interesting comparison between PS5 Pro and PC when it comes to RT, with Remedy seemingly choosing unique settings for its RT implementation on the Pro that can’t be matched exactly with the PC presets.

For example, reflections in puddles are visible when first taking control of Saga in the PC version, even on its lowest RT setting, while these are absent on PS5 Pro as the BVH has been reduced. But while BVH lacks certain elements, e.g. distant trees, the height map – the terrain of the area – is always included and therefore appears in reflections even far away. BVH refresh rate is also halved, helping to keep performance higher in the heavy forest scenes.

Denoising is also optimized for the PS5 Pro edition, so mirror-like surfaces look a little less mirror-like, and the hardware RT cutoff is also different. This means surfaces that are slightly less shiny can use RT on PC, but use a fallback software method on PS5 Pro. Interestingly, the denoiser here seems a little more reactive with less temporal weighting, so while it fails miserably in the wooden surfaces of the lodge on the PS5 Pro, it better handles the reflections from the moving mascots compared to the PC running without ray reconstruction.

Finally, running the forest scene on PS5 Pro and on a PC with as closely matched settings as possible gives us an idea of ​​the performance level of the Sony console versus the PC graphics card. The RTX 4070 is a natural point of comparison, but the game actually runs around 45 percent faster on PC in a matched scene. The RTX 3070 is closer, running about 10 percent faster than the PS5 Pro, while the RTX 2080 Ti is two percent slower on average.

Of course, this is just one scene in a game, but it suggests that the PS5 Pro’s graphics performance level is a little lower than we might have expected given its specs. Still, it’s an interesting early data point, and it’ll be fascinating to see if it’s emblematic of future PS5 Pro releases or if it’s particularly hard on the PSSR and PS5 Pro hardware.

Alan Wake 2 on PS5 Pro is one of the most interesting releases for the system to date, as it delivers exactly what we’ve come to expect from Sony’s premium machine in some areas, such as the inclusion of RT features, but falls short in others, such as image quality. It’s still early days for both the PS5 Pro and this particular version, and I hope we’ll see both continue to improve over time.