Deutsch
Español
Français
Italiano
Nederlands
Polski
Português
Русский
Türkçe
Svenska
Chinese
MagyarCheckMag | Alan Wake 2 works on the Steam Deck but only with user assistance ↺
Yes, Alan Wake 2 works on a Steam Deck! But before you get too excited there are some fairly major caveats. The first is that you need to be running Windows, or a dual boot system. As confirmed by Santiago Santiago on YouTube, Alan Wake 2 does not even launch when run through Steam OS.
With that out of the way let's take a look at what else is required to get this running.
The first thing you'll need to do is set the UMA Frame buffer Size in your Steam Deck's BIOS to 256M. While this might seem counter-intuitive this is the only way to get the game to launch without it complaining that you don't have 16 GB RAM installed.
Once that's done, you can boot into Windows and run the game. You'll likely get a warning saying that your GPU does not support all the recommended features, but that should not come as a surprise.
Once you pass the warning screen, you should find that the game runs. The only way to get a reasonable frame rate is to run the game at its lowest settings. Don't even think about turning on Ray Tracing. The game also needs to be run with FSR set to ON and ideally using the "Performance" or lower preset.
Considering this is a game that requires (as a minimum) a GeForce RTX 2060 or Radeon RX with 6 GB VRAM, the fact that this runs at all is no small miracle. The Mesh Shaders the game utilises eliminate most GPUs from the list as this feature is only present only in Direct X 12 Ultimate and is unsupported on many GPUs including Nvidia GTX 10 series cards.
That being said, the game runs and does so surprisingly well. In the first 20 or so minutes of gameplay, framerates fluctuate between 19 and 45 frames per second. However, there are a number of graphical glitches including water not being rendered correctly. Additionally, there are no firefights in this section of the game so you can expect the frame rate to tank as soon as any action begins to appear on screen.
This begs the question, while technically you can play Alan Wake 2 on a Steam Deck, the question remains whether you should. Given the overwhelmingly positive reviews of Alan Wake 2 the sub-par experience offered by the Steam Deck probably isn't going to do the game the justice it deserves. Playing on a machine that at least meets the minimum requirements is going to give you the best experience possible. If you absolutely must play on a Steam Deck, consider using Moonlight game streaming or an equivalent solution that is going to offer a far more fulfilling experience.
Equally, you may want to consider upgrading your GPU so you meet the minimum specification.
Source(s)
