Big gains for GTX 10-series cards.

With the release of update 1.0.16.1 today for Alan Wake 2 on the PC, the minimum system requirements have come down. Players will now need only an Nvidia GTX 1070 or an AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT GPU to play Alan Wake 2 on PC.

When Alan Wake 2 came out in October 2023, the minimum hardware needed to play the game at 1080p and 30FPS was an Nvidia RTX 2060 or AMD Radeon RX 6600 GPU. The reason for those initially high GPU requirements is because Alan Wake 2 released only for cards that support Mesh Shaders. This is a DirectX 12 Ultimate feature that only became supported with Nvidia's 20-series GPUs.

The minimum still lists all other factors as the same. That is to say, the Minimum requirements are for Low graphical settings, 1080p resolution, 30FPS gameplay. You will still need to use at least DLSS or FSR Quality, still need an Intel i5-7600K (or AMD equivalent), still need 16GB of RAM, and will still need 90GB of free space.


Alan Wake 2 developer, Remedy Entertainment, gave the update to Digital Foundry early in order to test out the new requirements. Their video, which can be found below shows some incredible gains for 10-series cards, notably the GTX 1070, GTX 1080, and GTX 1080 Ti.

It's nice to see that Alan Wake 2 is now accessible to a wider audience. It's a great game, as I mentioned many times throughout my Alan Wake 2 review. That review was based on the PlayStation 5 version of the game if only because I literally could not run the game on my GTX 1080 Ti powered PC at the time of release.