Inside Alan Wake 2: How Remedy Delivered A Visual Masterpiece

2023 was a brilliant year for advancements in video game graphics - and up there amongst the most astonishing achievements was Remedy’s Alan Wake 2. In this extended interview with the Remedy tech team, Alex Battaglia gets the opportunity to ask the developers literally anything and everything he wants to know about - from mesh shaders vs primitive shaders, to the team’s approach to ray tracing through to the game’s threading model, it’s all here... along with how the team scaled Alan Wake 2 to deliver the goods on Xbox Series S. Subscribe for more Digital Foundry: Join the DF Patreon to support the team more directly and to get access to everything we do via pristine quality downloads: Want some DF-branded tee-shirts, mugs, hoodies and more? Check out our store: For commercial enquiries, please contact business@ 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:13 What changes were needed after Control to make Alan Wake 2 possible? 00:06:15 Did the new scripting language conflict with goals of multi-threading? 00:07:27 How is the Alan Wake 2 threaded? 00:11:16 How is the game using mesh shaders and when was this decided? 00:14:35 What research was done for mesh shading? 00:16:30 How do you handle geometry across the platforms (PS5 vs. Xbox vs. PC)? 00:17:53 How is indirect lighting achieved without hardware ray tracing? 00:19:19 How does ray tracing mix in with the traditional rendering? 00:22:36 How is the game’s BVH managed? 00:25:15 What are the considerations as to what is included in the BVH? 00:27:05 How is noise handled from ray tracing? 00:28:17 How, when, and why was ray tracing not included in Alan Wake 2 for PS5/XSX? 00:30:18 What changes are needed to solve the “BVH problem“? 00:32:38 How, what, and how much is the game streaming from disk? 00:37:33 How is memory handled given the split nature of memory on PC? 00:39:09 How is the game scaled to Xbox Series S? 00:42:42 What post-launch changes have been made to improve performance? 00:45:13 What are you most proud of from your work on Alan Wake 2? 00:47:54 Any tech presentations on the game coming up? 00:39:49 Conclusion