Hot on the heels of the tech-focused chat with Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt RED we published earlier this week, today we’ve got another brief technical talk with Alan Wake 2 developer Remedy Entertainment. The second triple-A game to implement path tracing after CP2077, Alan Wake 2 stunned once again with the latest evolution of the Northlight engine, delivering what has been described by some as the most visually impressive game made to date, and that’s also largely true for the non-path traced version (which runs pretty well even on mid-range PCs).
After the praiseworthy launch, Remedy took some time to go through the specific advancements introduced to the Northlight engine compared to the previous outing (2019’s Control). We still had a few follow-up questions, though, and we sent them to the studio for answering. While they couldn’t respond to all of them, we received three hefty replies on big topics like the Mesh Shaders and DLSS 3.5 integration in Alan Wake 2, as well as a comment on the huge potential performance benefit of Work Graphs in future games.
How important was the integration of Mesh Shaders to the overall visual splendor seen in Alan Wake 2? Why do you think developers are only just starting to implement the feature despite the fact that it has been supported since Turing’s launch in 2018?
Tatu Aalto, Lead Graphics Programmer, Remedy Entertainment: To achieve high geometric detail on rendering, it is crucial to select very accurately the geometry that contributes to the image and only draw that. When combined with GPU-based occlusion culling, mesh shaders provide a very efficient and simple framework to use GPU power where it matters. On Alan Wake 2, we not only started using mesh shaders but rewrote the whole geometry rendering pipeline, starting from material definition to culling and rasterizing triangles. The gain on geometric complexity in Alan Wake 2 is a sum of multiple technical advances combined with a lot of work on the content authoring side to ensure that every triangle counts.
What do you think about DLSS 3.5 (Ray Reconstruction)? Was its implementation into your Northlight engine a complex task?
Tatu Aalto, Lead Graphics Programmer, Remedy Entertainment: We had the great pleasure of closely collaborating with a team of incredibly experienced engineers from Nvidia in making DLSS Ray Reconstruction work with Alan Wake 2. Underlying algorithms on Ray Reconstruction are obviously involved and complex, but we had deep confidence in the technical and visual excellence of the people who were involved in tweaking the algorithms for Alan Wake 2. The word complex is not the best way to describe the effort, but a lot of hard work and dedication was put into making sure that Ray Reconstruction works and looks as good as it does. Remedy has collaborated with Nvidia for a very long time, so that makes the work a lot easier.
In June, Microsoft announced a major new D3D12 feature called Work Graphs. Have you looked into this preview yet? If so, what do you think about its potential applications in games?
Tatu Aalto, Lead Graphics Programmer, Remedy Entertainment: Work Graphs are the natural next step in moving heavy graphics work from CPU to GPU, and we are eagerly waiting for GPU-based work submission to be adapted on all the platforms we target. Communication between CPU and GPU has been a major performance cost in real-time applications like games for a long time already, and we saw a large performance gain in Alan Wake 2 when moving more computation to happen fully on GPU. Having more fine-grained control on GPU scheduling ensures that all the available GPU power can be wisely used. Exposing something like this is very fundamental and can be used in many algorithms we run in Northlight.
Thank you for your time.
