Alan Wake 2's Demanding PC System Requirements Unveiled: Mesh Shading Takes Center Stage

Remedy has finally unveiled the PC system requirements for Alan Wake 2, and they are notably high. This doesn't come as a surprise, as the Finnish studio has always been at the forefront of pushing technological boundaries in their games.

Interestingly, the system requirements reveal that neither NVIDIA's GTX 10 Series nor AMD's Radeon RX 5000 Series are supported. The reason behind this decision, as revealed by Remedy's Lea-Newin, is that these graphics cards lack hardware support for Mesh Shaders.

Although the original tweet has been deleted, DSO Gaming managed to capture a snapshot of the information. Furthermore, a Remedy developer hinted that there might be a talk or blog post coming up to explain the implementation of Mesh Shaders in Alan Wake 2.

Mesh Shading technology may seem relatively new, but NVIDIA initially showcased it with the release of the Asteroids demo back in December 2018. Mesh Shading is designed to revolutionize the geometry pipeline by bringing the benefits of the compute programming model to the front end of the graphics pipeline. It also enhances performance and allows for higher levels of geometry thanks to advanced culling and pre-culling. Mesh Shading was later integrated into Microsoft's DirectX12 Ultimate, and the first NVIDIA driver certified for Mesh Shading and other DX12 Ultimate features was rolled out in April 2020.

Up until now, only NetEase's Justice MMO had implemented support for this technology, managing to push 1.8 billion triangles at 4K@60FPS on an RTX 3060Ti GPU. Back then, Mesh Shading was hailed as the future of mainstream gaming, and this prediction appears to have come to fruition with Alan Wake 2.