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Alan Wake PC | Tech, performance and information thread

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
The game runs surprisingly well on an E8500 and GTX285 with maxed settings except AA (4x) as far as the framerate reporting goes but so far in half the areas I've been there's a weird stuttering-like slowdown effect kicking in every second or so, any ideas?

The game seems alright but they really should have worked more on the animations, and also make all the FMV scenes with the game engine instead as they look completely different in how they're rendered, the lighting, etc, compared to how they're in game.
 
For some reason my fan goes crazy with this game....I am playing with 35+ fps everything maxed except godrays, then the fan kicks in and goes wild and my fps crash to the low twenties...

I have a laptop with a gtx 485....I got it back in august last year and performance has definitely worsened since then, any idea how I might improve things? its pathetic
 

Jtrizzy

Member
I'm stuck on a section in chapter 2 where you need to use the flares. I didn't realise that you had to hold in the mouse button and wasted and bunch of them, now the game is telling me to 'grab the flares from the emergency box' and there's none left, leaving me with just my flashlight which is making this section all but impossible for me. Now I have to restart the whole bloody chapter because there are no quicksaves/quickloads or any kind of staggered saves at all.

...sigh...
The part where you are defending the guy while he unlocks the gate? I did that too, but you can beat it with just the flashlight if you have a few batteries.
 

TheExodu5

Banned
For some reason my fan goes crazy with this game....I am playing with 35+ fps everything maxed except godrays, then the fan kicks in and goes wild and my fps crash to the low twenties...

I have a laptop with a gtx 485....I got it back in august last year and performance has definitely worsened since then, any idea how I might improve things? its pathetic

Sounds like it's overheating. If it's on a flat surface, try propping it up a bit so it can intake some air. Clean the vents if they're dusty.
 
had to play a couple of checkpoints when i went home for lunch. i just HAD to. just did the bit in question. yeah, that'd be tough without flares :) doable though i think, espescially if you have dodging down.
 
I, personally, always have temperature monitoring software running on my machine at all times. I use Realtemp, which monitors my CPU and GPU and keeps track of the max temps and when they occurred and it just sits in my system tray.
 

Darklord

Banned
Man, the lip syncing is bad. MAN. Haven't seen it that bad in years. The rest is good though.

2012-02-18_00003wny09.jpg

2012-02-18_00005ktaqv.jpg

2012-02-18_00009rux1d.jpg
 
D

Deleted member 17706

Unconfirmed Member
I'm very suspicious about those external laptop coolers. I've heard too many stories about them doing more harm than good. No idea about that particular one, though.
 

Sethos

Banned
I'm very suspicious about those external laptop coolers. I've heard too many stories about them doing more harm than good. No idea about that particular one, though.

It very much depends on the laptop, where the exhaust fans are located in relation to the external coolers. Many of these external coolers are rubbish because they either break the exhaust flow, maybe even push it back in or provide a new surface with not enough cooling, which just adds to the heating issues. This looks to have a pretty large area air flow and no laptops have exhausts underneath ( Unless the designer was on drugs ), so it should be good.
 
I, personally, always have temperature monitoring software running on my machine at all times. I use Realtemp, which monitors my CPU and GPU and keeps track of the max temps and when they occurred and it just sits in my system tray.

A bit off topic, but how do you set up RealTemp to keep track of GPU temps? I only seem to get CPU.
 

n0n44m

Member
guess I was quick enough to grab that greenmangaming offer last night :)

seems to play pretty well @ 1080p, 4x AA, maxed on my 4.8 ghz 2600K + GTX480 @ 900 (overclocking GPU made quite a difference in fps)

pre-rendered cutscenes are ugly, lipsync is pretty bad and a couple of textures aren't the greatest but overall it's a damn fine looking game

also I love the environments in this game ... I really should book a trip to the Pacific Northwest sometime ;)

got quite a backlog but I'm looking forward to playing it over the weekend in comfy couch mode (DS3 motioninjoy) with the lights off and the home theater set to maximum volume

<3 Remedy

----

for laptops, (1) make sure there is no dust/dirt in the cooling intake/outtake vents, (2) raise the area with the vents a bit so you're certain it gets enough air, (3) *when you're out of warranty* (or crazy like I am) , google your laptop for instructions on how to remove the cooling and replace the thermal paste/pads with stuff that actually works (compared to the crap that my Dell XPS M1330 had, although that is a pretty notorious model)
 
I've been to the Oh Deer! diner by the way...



the real toilets are on the right as you pass the lamp lady, where that door is with the horribly low texture on it. the real corridor doesn't go around to the left by the fire exit, so the place Barbara Jagger meets you doesn't exist.

also, the interior decor is based on how the diner looked when it was in Twin Peaks, back when it was called the Mar-T cafe. food is pretty good. stupid portions... though i prefer The Fall City Grill in nearby Fall City.

Twedes is in North Bend, WA for any interested travellers.

i'd love to know if any of the other places are closely based on real locations, and if so, where they are.
 
A bit off topic, but how do you set up RealTemp to keep track of GPU temps? I only seem to get CPU.

I think it was a feature they added quite a while ago. The button on the upper left hand corner of the main window shows the GPU temp. If you click the button it will open another dialog box that displays the min and max temperatures as well.
L9AlM.jpg
 

scitek

Member
guess I was quick enough to grab that greenmangaming offer last night :)

seems to play pretty well @ 1080p, 4x AA, maxed on my 4.8 ghz 2600K + GTX480 @ 900 (overclocking GPU made quite a difference in fps)

Yeah, same here. I realized last night that the latest beta drivers I had installed for my Radeon were messing up my OC in Afterburner, so I went back to the latest official drivers and my fps shot up a good bit when my clock speed was adjusted.
 

derFeef

Member
I've been to the Oh Deer! diner by the way...



the real toilets are on the right as you pass the lamp lady, where that door is with the horribly low texture on it. the real corridor doesn't go around to the left by the fire exit, so the place Barbara Jagger meets you doesn't exist.

also, the interior decor is based on how the diner looked when it was in Twin Peaks, back when it was called the Mar-T cafe. food is pretty good. stupid portions... though i prefer The Fall City Grill in nearby Fall City.

Twedes is in North Bend, WA for any interested travellers.

i'd love to know if any of the other places are closely based on real locations, and if so, where they are.

Oh cool! Hopefully there was no black-clothed shady lady...

CGtalk has a feature and it shows some reallife->game locales transition.
http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/alan_wake
 
This game looks incredible, and runs like a dream. Remedy are right back in the good books as far as I'm concerned, at least from a technical perspective. So far it seems pretty fun though, and shooting a bunch of dudes with a flare looks glorious.
 

evlcookie

but ever so delicious
Some guy over on the Nvidia forums said to try running the game with the SLI profile 0x02502805 (F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin). I just tried it, and although there is quite a lot of flicker, the game runs like a dream. So I wouldn't call it a fix, but it gives me hope that the game can be made to work well with SLI.

Yea i was just reading about this.

AMD also seems to have released a new CAP for alan wake. Could be good for those with crossfire. - http://sites.amd.com/us/game/downloads/pages/crossfirex-app-profiles.aspx
 

Angry Fork

Member
I just spent the last 7 hours playing. I got up to the part where
you're on the farm at the rockstar stage thing with Barry
and then the computer restarted out of nowhere. I'm thinking maybe because it got too hot or something.

I re-open it and go to continue game and it's at the beginning of the game because steam DOESN'T FUCKING UPDATE WHILE IN-GAME AND YOU HAVE TO EXIT FOR IT TO UPLOAD TO CLOUD.

I'm mortified. I can't believe I lost 7 hours of gameplay over something so fucking stupid as cloud storage. Does anyone know if there is still some kind of save offline because the game constantly auto-saves in game so how can it only record what steam cloud says? The game is amazing and it won't be a chore to replay what I missed but it still really sucks because I got a lot of manuscripts, I searched around a lot, I was really into the story at that point and so on. Talk about completely killing the moment.
 
I just spent the last 7 hours playing. I got up to the part where
you're on the farm at the rockstar stage thing with Barry
and then the computer restarted out of nowhere. I'm thinking maybe because it got too hot or something.

I re-open it and go to continue game and it's at the beginning of the game because steam DOESN'T FUCKING UPDATE WHILE IN-GAME AND YOU HAVE TO EXIT FOR IT TO UPLOAD TO CLOUD.

I'm mortified. I can't believe I lost 7 hours of gameplay over something so fucking stupid as cloud storage. Does anyone know if there is still some kind of save offline because the game constantly auto-saves in game so how can it only record what steam cloud says? The game is amazing and it won't be a chore to replay what I missed but it still really sucks because I got a lot of manuscripts, I searched around a lot, I was really into the story at that point and so on. Talk about completely killing the moment.


Thats weird, the game should store locally too. Try to find a 100% save on the internet and restart the chapter maybe ?

From faq
SAVE GAMES and SAVE DATA
Alan Wake saves data to your "My Documents" folder (e.g. C:\Users\<username>\Documents) under Remedy\AlanWake. This contains resolution.xml and if enabled possibly some debugging information. Game regenerates these if not found. Your save game is stored under your Steam profile, and mirrored into Steam Cloud if that option is enabled.

Your save should still be there
 

derFeef

Member
"Remedy also received help from many other studios such as CaptiveMotion who helped with the facial animations and Soundelux DMG who helped with the sound effects just to name a few."

So do we blame CaptiveMotion for the bad lip-syncing? :p

I read somewhere that it was basically a problem with how the faces are modeled, the motion captured data did not work well on them and redoing everything was no option. Maybe Petri can step in and tell us if that's true :)
 

TheExodu5

Banned
I've never had that kind of issue with Steam cloud before...usually there'd be a local save that would take precedence anyways.
 

Mr_Zombie

Member
"Remedy also received help from many other studios such as CaptiveMotion who helped with the facial animations and Soundelux DMG who helped with the sound effects just to name a few."

So do we blame CaptiveMotion for the bad lip-syncing? :p

I seriously doubt that people responsible for this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUbbVoFPdi4
would be able to commence such awful lip-sync as can be seen in Alan Wake :|. And it's weird because sometimes facial animation in Alan Wake can be good, other times it's just horrible.
 

Corky

Nine out of ten orphans can't tell the difference.
Some guy over on the Nvidia forums said to try running the game with the SLI profile 0x02502805 (F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin). I just tried it, and although there is quite a lot of flicker, the game runs like a dream. So I wouldn't call it a fix, but it gives me hope that the game can be made to work well with SLI.

Cheers, this worked wonders for me getting as good as 0.9-1.0 scaling. Went from 25-30 to 50-60 triplebuffered, though I get this occasional flickering ( oddly enough most of it is in menus and rather rarely in game ).
 
Hopefully American Nightmare will have better lypsinc. We will find out soon.

it better have, given what they said last year.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/04/11/remedy-la-noire-raises-the-bar-for-facial-animation/

Edge recently visited the offices of Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment, where the studio is hard at work implementing brand new facial animation technology. Created by lead animator John Root, the system uses motion capture to generate scans of actors (accurate to within 0.02 inches) and encapsulates 64 different facial poses.

Root claims those are a basis for every possible human expression. Animators can manipulate faces in real-time rather than rely on canned recordings, and future improvements to the technology may allow them to adjust coloring based on simulated blood flow beneath the skin. The first showcase for Root's kit is a new model of Alan Wake -- a fitting subject, considering he had some trouble with lip syncing in his debut game.

not expecting that level of facial animation in American Nightmare, but i'm definately expecting better than the first Alan Wake.
 

Alexios

Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Some of mine from the beginning. Not very high res cos my monitor broke down so I'm using my old one...
http://minus.com/m0h0nLwp2#1o
Not a particularly outstanding game visually but eh, a cohesive solid look and all, good enough and room for improvement for beefier PCs with extra AA (oh, and FXAA, I forgot I disabled that also on top of low AA).

But yeah, any clues about that slowdown stuttering? It doesn't seem like normal stuttering, I'm not actually losing frames and having characters/camera views jump with missing the inbetween state, it just seems to actually slowdown... But with the framerate remaining constant at mostly above 30 fps so far... I guess I'll try reducing settings like the godrays which I've barely noticed so far even though it's the one effect I always wanted to have on in games like Crysis and Metro 2033... Maybe SSAO.
 

Q8D3vil

Member
i said im not going to buy it since the "no sli thing", but i couldn't resist after gmg insane deal.
i need to wait for a good sli profile now
 
Some of mine from the beginning. Not very high res cos my monitor broke down so I'm using my old one...
http://minus.com/m0h0nLwp2#1o
Not a particularly outstanding game visually but eh, a cohesive solid look and all, good enough and room for improvement for beefier PCs with extra AA (oh, and FXAA, I forgot I disabled that also on top of low AA).

But yeah, any clues about that slowdown stuttering? It doesn't seem like normal stuttering, I'm not actually losing frames and having characters/camera views jump with missing the inbetween state, it just seems to actually slowdown... But with the framerate remaining constant at mostly above 30 fps so far... I guess I'll try reducing settings like the godrays which I've barely noticed so far even though it's the one effect I always wanted to have on in games like Crysis and Metro 2033... Maybe SSAO.

if you're using vsync, use the in game vsync and not the vsync in your drivers. that helped someone out with similar stuttering earlier.
 
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