In a rare move, Alan Wake 2’s minimum PC requirements have been lowered

Remedy is lowering the official minimum system requirements for Alan Wake 2 on PC. The sequel launched in October without full support for Nvidia’s GTX 10-series of GPUs because Remedy opted for mesh shading that’s part of DirectX 12 Ultimate and not supported by GPUs like Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 or AMD’s RX 5600 XT.

Now, Remedy has “optimized rendering for GPU’s that don’t support mesh shaders,” meaning the minimum GPU requirements now include the GeForce GTX 1070 and Radeon RX 5600 XT instead of the more powerful GeForce RTX 2060 and Radeon RX 6600. That’s good news for owners of older PC gaming rigs, especially as Alan Wake 2 had some pretty hefty GPU requirements to begin with.

You should now be able to play Alan Wake 2 at 1080p / 30fps on the GTX 1070 and RX 5600 cards, but if you’re still hanging on to a GTX 1060, then you might even be able to get a more playable frame rate now. Digital Foundry got an early look at the new Alan Wake 2 patch earlier this week and found some demanding areas on a GTX 1060 now output at 26fps instead of 18fps.

Even modern GPUs get some performance improvements from this latest patch, with the RTX 4070 seeing nearly a 14 percent frame rate jump, according to Digital Foundry tests. Update 1.0.16.1 is available for Alan Wake 2 today.