Remedy's plant bone tech is just one of the reasons Alan Wake 2 is the best-looking videogame of 2023
If you've been playing Alan Wake 2 you may have noticed just how pretty that game is. I'd go as far to say it's the best looking videogame of 2023. Developer Remedy has done incredibly well to make what could've been a very dull and dark world look vibrant and detailed, and has since divulged what's actually going on behind the scenes in the Northlight engine to achieve it. And boy, it's a lot.
The studio outlines heaps of features it's rolled out with the Northlight engine powering Alan Wake 2 in a blog post. It's an interesting read, not only for the technical information on the studio's proprietary engine, but because it helps explain why mesh shaders are such a big deal in Alan Wake 2—when you're staring down the barrel of heaps of geometry you start to understand why the game chugs without them.
«With GPU-driven rendering using mesh shaders, we can now do occlusion culling down to a single-pixel precision and use everything in a scene as an occluder,» Remedy says. «This ability to only draw what is visible means that the world of AW2 has more geometric detail than we've ever shipped before.»
Remedy provides some comparison images of the in-game scene and what it looks like with all the meshlets—collections of triangles—visible.
For a point of comparison, one reason why Cities: Skylines 2 is said to struggle with performance is due to its inability to cull the objects that aren't actually visible. It's loading in high numbers of triangles for highly-detailed objects and rendering the lot, often across multiple rendering passes. While Alan Wake 2 is a demanding game with everything turned up to 11, especially path tracing, it does at least run a whole lot better than Cities: Skylines 2. Though that's admittedly an
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