Ray Tracing Alan Wake 2
Alan Wake II pushes the boundaries of visual fidelity with its ambitious implementation of “full ray tracing,” also known as path tracing. This means ray tracing handles all lighting, reflections, and shadows, creating a more realistic and immersive environment. The game features ray-traced direct lighting for accurate and dynamic shadows, ray-traced indirect lighting for realistic bounced light, ray-traced reflections on surfaces like water and glass, and ray-traced transparency for convincing interaction with transparent objects.
Shifting over to games, and again, looking at Alan wake 2, where the performance difference is higher than we saw in our non ray tracing games, with 52% more frames than the 3060 Ti and 23% more than the 4060 Ti, which means that there is a noticeable generational ray tracing jump going from the 30 series to the 50 series, which is a bigger jump than we saw from raster performance. This performance does come with a caveat, though, as this game is so demanding with ray tracing that we run it with upscaling set to balanced, and with the 5060 Ti being very focused on its upscaling performance, this could be the reason for this jump. Having a look at 1440,p we see an even larger performance gap of 58% over the 3060 Ti, while the performance jump from the 4060 Ti remains around the same with 25% higher frames on average. Again though, it could be the upscaling that’s causing the much larger jump from the 3060 Ti, so we’ll only draw our conclusion after we’ve looked at the rest of our games.
