Last Friday saw the much-anticipated release of the PC requirements for the upcoming Alan Wake 2. Since then, the community has been pretty sour.
Many gamers have taken to social media to vent about the unrealistic hardware expectations for the upcoming title. Now it turns out that those using a Nvidia RTX 10-series GPU or AMD RX 5000-series may have even more reason to be upset.
In a now-deleted Tweet from a Remedy developer, Allan Wake 2 will rely on mesh shader support to run. This would explain why the 10-series and 5000-series cards don’t appear on the specs because they don’t support mesh shading.
For those who don’t know, mesh shaders are designed to replace traditional vertex and geometry shaders, allowing developers to optimise the rendering process. However, this new technique requires explicit GPU support. For Nvidia, this means Turing and above, i.e. the RTX 20- series, and for AMD, the RX 6000-series onwards.
If you’re wondering what this means practically, it means that gamers using older-generation graphics cards could very well be out of luck when it comes to playing the game.