Here’s how Alan Wake 2 PS5 Pro update brings ray tracing to console

Remedy Entertainment has confirmed the specifics of the PS5 Pro upgrade for Alan Wake 2, with the studio taking advantage of the increased power of the console to add ray tracing, or increase the general fidelity and performance of other graphics options.

Built using Remedy’s Northlight engine, Alan Wake 2 on PC made good use of ray tracing hardware in Nvidia’s GPUs in particular, layering in a number of different effects to add to the strong lighting and visual style. Xbox Series X|S and PS5 just couldn’t handle them, though, and Remedy instead focussed on the core graphics and other techniques. Now with its own hardware upscaling solution on PS5 Pro – PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) – and the beefier AMD GPU, some of those ray tracing effects can also be brought to console.

As detailed by Remedy, the new PlayStation 5 Pro Quality mode will add ray traced reflections (both opaque and transparent), using an internal render resolution of 2176×1224 and PSSR to upscale that to a full 4K.

These specs and performance targets would seemingly put the PS5 Pro between the low and medium performance targets for ray tracing on PC.

If you don’t need fancier reflections, then there’s an enhanced Performance mode for PS5 Pro instead. This roughly takes the image quality and render settings of the base PS5 Quality mode, and runs them at 60FPS.

This leans very heavily on the upscaling of PSSR with a render resolution of 1536×864, upscaling all the way to a 4K output, and running at 60FPS. By contrast, Base PS5 Quality mode outputs at an upscaled 1440p and 30FPS.

While the PS5 Pro update won’t matter for a couple weeks, today is a big day for Alan Wake 2 with the release of The Lake House DLC expansion, and the free Anniversary update. This includes new quality of life and accessibility options. The game now has gyro aiming, inverted X axis options, improved haptics for all healing and throwables on DualSense, and not just guns, and a big suite of optional gameplay assists that contain toggles for:

• Quick turn
• Auto complete QTE
• Button tapping to single tap
• Weapon charging with taps
• Healing items with taps
• Lightshifter with taps
• Player invulnerability
• Player immortality
• One shot kill
• Infinite ammo
• Infinite flashlight batteries

Tags: alan wake 2, PS5 Pro