Now if the engine could take further advantage of the additional cores, we could see better results with the default quad-core (compared to the overclocked dual-core). Ironically, a dual-core at 4.2Ghz offers a ‘smoother’ gaming experience than a quad-core at 3.0Ghz. When we tried to run the game at the default clocks of our Q9650, we noticed a 10-12fps hit. Since we weren’t GPU limited with those settings, we could easily notice the results of our CPU experimentations. Our GPU usage with those settings was around 65%. In order to avoid any GPU limitations, we tested Alan Wake at low settings and at 720p. Alan Wake PC also loves CPUs with higher frequencies. However, we’d expected a bit more from Alan Wake’s multi-threaded capabilities. But make no mistake you’ll definitely notice an increase in your overall performance. Sure, a 100% usage in all cores could possibly damage some CPUs and introduce crashes, but we were hopping for at least 80-90% usage. Moreover, we can see that none of our four cores was maxed out. Still though, we’ve expected a bigger difference between these two setups, as both Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Battlefield 3 showed significant gains with quad-cores (15+ fps). As we can see, Alan Wake PC scales well with four cores and there is a 5-10fps difference between a dual-core and a quad-core. Remedy has stated that the game takes advantage of quad-cores, and they were partially right. However, the game is playable even at 30fps, while at 40-46fps it feels quite smooth. Obviously, there is a difference between 30fps and 60fps. This is mainly due to the clever motion blur techniques that were used to both titles, and Alan Wake has a similar feel to Dirt 2. Crysis feels quite smooth even at 30fps, whereas Dirt 2 feels smooth at 40fps. This is something we’ve seen in both Crysis and Dirt 2. Ironically – and given its slow-paced nature – Alan Wake PC feels smooth even with a low framerate. A GTX275 can run the game with 30-35fps at 1080p with max settings and 2X AA. Although the game offers a variety of graphical options, gamers can’t disable completely AA to gain some extra performance. Alan Wake PC’s requirements are quite high. Nvidia and Remedy are working on it and a patch/fix will hopefully be released in the coming days or weeks. The downside though is that it introduces various artifacts, especially when enemies and fog are on-screen. We are talking about 90% better performance so yeah, this profile is ideal for all those with old GPUs, running in SLI mode. There are areas were the scaling gets halved but overall, this SLI profile does wonders. The good news is that SLI scaling with this profile is amazing. Currently, there is no SLI profile for Alan Wake, but you can force it via FEAR 2’s SLI profile. As usual, we used a Q9650 4.2 Ghz with a GTX295, 4GB of RAM, Windows 7 64bit and the latest version of Nvidia’s ForceWare. Alan Wake has been released for the PC, so it’s time now to see how Remedy’s little gem performs on a modern-day PC. Quick forward two years and here we are, with its PC version finally hitting our platform. Therefore, Remedy decided to make it more linear and offer the experience they have been targeting for all this time. It was cool but as a horror game, it just couldn’t work. Truth is that the open-world tech demo simply didn’t work. First, we’ve seen open-world titles in X360 so Remedy wouldn’t have any – technical – issue with developing such a title for Microsoft’s console. Some people think that the game changed from an open-world title to a linear horror action adventure due to X360’s exclusivity, but that is not true. Alan Wake is a game that a lot of PC gamers have been waiting for.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |