Remedy has detailed the sort of technical enhancements future PS5 Pro owners can look forward to when playing Alan Wake 2 on Sony's upgraded console. The game will retain the same Performance and Quality modes available on base PS5 systems, but when run on a PS5 Pro, they'll look and run much better — the standout feature being the introduction of ray tracing in the Quality mode at 4K in 30 frames-per-second.
As for the Performance Mode, it has been updated to run at the same resolution as the base PS5's Quality mode, but at 60fps. "The Performance Mode on the PS5 Pro features significantly higher output resolution and has more visual detail compared to the base PS5," Remedy explained in a blog post. The "image stability, fog, volumetric lighting, and shadow accuracy have been improved on the Pro".
When running the game in Quality mode on PS5 Pro, ray tracing will be active to "allow dynamic indirect lighting to be brought in from the surrounding scene. They are not limited to using information only from the main camera view shading or coarse and static signed distance fields like our screen space techniques." The developer provides a deep dive into the reasoning behind the technical upgrades, but below you can see two comparison shots between ray tracing off and on:
Following its work on Control: Ultimate Edition, the team already had experience with implementing ray tracing, so the work was mostly about selecting the correct effects and utilising PS5 Pro-specific improvements. "We chose to include ray tracing in the Quality mode. The decision to include ray traced reflections for opaque and transparent came down to balancing quality and performance, keeping the 30fps frame-rate target in mind." Remedy goes further in-depth in the blog post.
Alan Wake 2 will be updated for all users tomorrow with the newly accounted Anniversary Update, and The Lake House DLC also launches on 22nd October 2024. Will you be returning to Alan Wake 2 to check out all its PS5 Pro upgrades next month? Let us know in the comments below and check out All PS5 Pro Enhanced Games through the link.