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The recent launch of Alan Wake 2 has brought much-deserved attention to the latest technical achievement from Remedy Entertainment. As expected, the Finnish developer has ensured their new survival horror experience is a next-gen showcase, with all the bells and whistles that would make even the beefiest PCs sweat.
On the PC side of things, this has resulted in Nvidia driver updates for high-end PC users to get a smooth experience across the board, including raytracing. However, there is a catch; the latest driver, 545.92, is also notorious for causing issues across PCs and impacting the performance of games as a whole. So, should players hold off or give it a go? The answer is not that simple.
The latest Nvidia driver update featuring optimization for Alan Wake 2 has been problematic for many users
As spotted on the official Nvidia sub on Reddit, users have been piling up issues they have been seeing after updating to 545.92. These range from glitchy UI on Windows 10 and video artifacts to noticeable stuttering in various games. Microsoft's Halo Infinite, in particular, has seen a drastic increase in loading times on top of worse performance on Nvidia Maxwell (GTX 900 series) GPUs.
I also faced issues of my own with the previous 545.84 rendition of the new driver, resulting in low GPU utilization spikes in certain games. Rolling back to the older 537.58 driver did not help. So I had to resort to the excellent third-party DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) by Wagnardsoft to completely remove all traces of the driver from my hardware and then revert to 547.58 to get everything fixed.
Alan Wake 2, in particular, will recommend players to update if they are on anything before 545, so it does seem like the game is geared towards utilizing the most out of those drivers. But if players get unrelated problems due to this update, they are better off waiting until a more stable build is released. Some PC gamers report blue and even black screens - though the latter is exclusive to Windows 11 Insider build users.
Overall, it does not sound like a good time for PC gamers. Given every setup is different, there's always the possibility that your specific rig may not see any of these issues. The only way to know is to update and see if anything has changed for the worse. Considering most comments under the Nvidia driver post have had negative experiences, we recommend waiting until a new update has been rolled out.
On that note, Alan Wake 2 is still playable even with the older 537 driver version. So those on the fence should not hold themselves back from enjoying the game, especially if they have a system capable of running it. Those who do not may consider checking out the original game instead.
Alan Wake 2 is currently out for PC (via Epic Games Store), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
