Alan Wake 2 is one of the best-looking video games ever made. With beautiful lighting and intricate asset detail, it's a bit of a technical showcase, especially on PC with path tracing enabled. The PS5 release also looks brilliant, as I covered last week, with the similar visuals bereft of some path-tracing niceties and with some image quality issues. However, I didn't spend a huge amount of time looking at the differences between quality and performance modes.
Next up is shadow quality. The performance mode's shadows are less comprehensive, so distant objects don't have shadows. Neither mode represents PC at its best, but the quality mode does have obviously better shadow coverage though overall resolution looks the same. Most of the difference in typical play comes down to shadow filtering, which operates at a higher quality level in the quality mode.
PS5 doesn't fare quite as well. Certain areas really struggle in the performance mode, with an unstable feel in typical play in the affected areas. The frame-rate delta against the Series X is surprising, with the PS5 consistently failing to reach its frame-time target in some missions. The same is true in the quality mode. The PS5 is just running up against the 33.3ms frame budget in tougher areas like the second Saga Anderson mission.
Beyond that concession, though, the Series S looks fine with visual settings similar to the Series X performance mode. Object density is about the same, while shadow quality is identical. Volumetric lights also appear to have the same rather limited resolution on Series S and Series X performance mode. Textures do throw up some differences, however.
Performance-wise, the Series S manages a pretty stable 30fps with an update that is a bit more consistent than PS5 but falls slightly short of its more powerful sibling. There are some occasional moments in tougher areas where it can drop frames, though it tends to be well-behaved elsewhere.
Series S lacks a 60fps performance mode, but the 30fps mode you get holds up with generally consistent frame-rates and only rare dips from the target. It's more consistent in our tests than PS5 in its own 30fps mode.
Source: Gaming Daily Report (gamingdailyreport.net)
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