Remedy has revealed the PS5 Pro enhancements for Alan Wake 2.
In a new blog post, the developer confirmed that it will take "full advantage" of the recently announced PS5 Pro to enhance its 2023 horror game further.
For starters, Alan Wake 2's Quality and Performance modes will be upgraded for the mid-generation console and will utilize Sony's upscaling method, PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR).
The PS5 Pro Quality mode will be 30fps and feature ray tracing reflections, as well as have an output resolution of 4K.
Meanwhile, the Performance mode won't feature ray tracing but will allow 60fps and an output resolution of 4K, and will target approximately the same image quality (render) settings as the base PS5's Quality mode.
"The Performance Mode on the PS5 Pro features significantly higher output resolution and has more visual detail compared to the base PS5," Remedy said. "The overall image stability, fog, volumetric lighting, and shadow accuracy have been improved on the Pro."
Remedy shared its process in upgrading Alan Wake 2 for the PS5 Pro, explaining that increasing the rendering resolution was among the easiest routes to improve image quality. It also experimented by upgrading the 60fps Performance mode output from 1440p to 4k and adding PSSR, which "positively impacted image crispness and stability under motion."
"Increasing the internal rendering resolution consumes a lot of processing power, no matter how powerful your hardware is," the team explained. "However, in our experiments, even putting all the added power to increased rendering resolution provided a barely noticeable difference in the output image or its quality. Adding more pixels to gain visual quality is not straightforward with the new AI-based upscaling methods."
The studio said that since Alan Wake 2 is "visually incredibly detailed and rich", it was a "tough fit for ray tracing, especially compared to our previous game, Control".
Still, the studio welcomed the challenge of upgrading the game for PS5 Pro, saying, "With ray traced effects, the detail of the world in Alan Wake 2 can be observed even more accurately than before on the console, and the image is more stable in complex lighting situations."
"We've always wanted to bring cutting-edge visuals to our games, but everything is always a balancing act between the frame rate, visual quality, technical and hardware constraints, development resources and what we wish to artistically achieve with the game," Remedy added.
The team went on to talk about the benefits of ray tracing but said that it "comes with a cost" since "each ray must be traced, and its hit evaluated and shaded".
"In a game like Alan Wake 2, its complex light-material interactions and rich environments can make tracing, shading, and denoising even a single ray tracing effect too expensive to justify the cost depending on the hardware," it said.
"Geometrically Alan Wake 2 is a very dense game. The usage of a GPU-driven rendering pipeline and its fine-grained culling with the skinning ran on GPU made it possible to create densely populated forest scenes with layers and layers of foliage and trees encountered during Saga’s gameplay segments taking place in the lush environments of the Pacific North-West."
Alan Wake 2 is one of the best horror games you can play on PS5 right now, and its second expansion, titled The Lake House, launches today.
