Alan Wake 2 is about to receive an important patch that will improve the compatibility of the game’s engine with older GPU architectures that did not have Mesh Shading support. When the game was released last year, it required Mesh Shading support to run at the desired performance level. In fact, this resulted in older cards, such as the GTX 10 series, not providing a good gaming experience.
Mesh Shaders allow game developers to handle polygons with more power and control, transmits Videocardz. This was a necessary upgrade to traditional vertex shader geometry, given that modern games will soon render billions of triangles across the screen. Future games will only become more visually demanding, so this technology is essential for advanced visual effects.
Currently, Mesh Shading is only supported at the DirectX12 Ultimate level, which means it works on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20+, AMD Radeon RX with RDNA2+, and Intel Arc GPUs. The technology does not work on GeForce GTX 10 series graphics cards, which are still quite popular despite their age. The upcoming Alan Wake 2 update will bring optimizations for these cards.
Although the game could be run on GPUs that do not support DX12U, the game showed a message that it did not support Mesh Shading and the game ran with very poor performance.
Alan Wake 2 forest walk scene (1080p, FSR2 quality, PS5 Performance Preset):
In general, the more powerful the GPU, the more of a boost gamers can expect from this patch. The GTX 1060 can exceed 30 FPS on average with the patch, but it is still not recommended for optimal gaming experience. Instead, Digital Foundry has concluded that the GTX 1070 is the base GPU compatible with this game.
The new patch has no release date yet. There are still some things that Remedy (the developer) could improve, such as allowing gamers to lock the frame rate with more options or adding AMD FSR3 with frame generation integration.