Alan Wake 2 might be able to run on GTX 10 and AMD 5000 series cards, but there is a catch

With the year nearing its end, Alan Wake 2 is on many fans' watchlists as one of the biggest swansongs of 2023. The upcoming supernatural horror game from Remedy Entertainment has people up in arms after a developer recently revealed that the game would not work on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1000 series (so up to the 1080 Ti) and the AMD Radeon RX 5000 series of GPUs.

This is due to Alan Wake 2 solely relying on mesh shaders for rendering, which is tech that older Nvidia and AMD GPU hardware does not support. There is some hope, however, but it will also come with a caveat.

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How Alan Wake 2 may be feasible on Nvidia GTX 10 series and AMD Radeon 5000 series GPUs

There still may be some hope for older hardware users (Image via X: @newincpp)

One of the developers at Remedy Entertainment disclosed that Alan Wake 2 is set to solely utilize mesh shaders. In a nutshell, it is far more performant than the traditional vertex shaders used for games normally while also drastically boosting the number of geometric details on display. It is not new tech either, as graphics manufacturer Nvidia showcased its implementation all the way back in 2018.

But since older tech does not support it, game developers have seen no reason to opt for it. With the upcoming successor to the cult classic 2010 horror game, however, Remedy Entertainment wants to one-up the industry by pioneering the use of this tech in their game. This clearly has fans worried that older-class cards that can still flex their hardware muscles are rendered obsolete.

In the case of the RX 5000 series from AMD, they are not old but instead lack mesh shader tech in the first place. Interestingly, the developer also touched on something that may make the game possible on the GTX 10 series and the RX 5000 series. To summarize, the team tinkered around with vertex shaders but dropped the idea due to bugs and performance issues.

However, if a modder can get the vertex shaders working in Alan Wake 2 via an unofficial patch, a large portion of the gaming user base might be able to play the game without having to upgrade. Note that this is by no means guaranteed. As it stands now, vertex shaders are officially unsupported by Alan Wake 2.

Assuming modders get them working in the game, players can almost assuredly expect worse performance and visual quality than the normal build. This is certainly inevitable as that is how graphics tech works in the first place, especially since mesh shaders promise improvements on newer series cards. On that note, here are the full system requirements for Alan Wake 2.

Given how extreme they are, player's negative reactions to the insanely high specs are understandable. It remains to be seen whether or not Remedy's decision to make such a cutting-edge title will pay off since it fundamentally segregates a large portion of the PC user base.

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Alan Wake 2 is set for release on PC (via Epic Games Store exclusively), PS5, and Xbox Series X|S platforms on October 27, 2023.