When the PC requirements for Alan Wake 2 were announced last Friday, there was a big stir among the PC gaming community. But users with Nvidia RTX 10 series GPUs and recent AMD RX 5000 series GPUs may have even more reason for pessimism, as a now-deleted tweet (do they still call it a tweet?) from a Remedy developer states that the upcoming release may not work at all depending on mesh shader support.

A screenshot of the deleted post, created by Remedy Games developer @newincpp, was shared by the Redditor, in which the 10 and 5000 series cards are not shown in the specs because they do not support mesh shading It has been revealed that they do not.

Later in the thread, a few olive branches are offered, speculating that the vertex shader path is still in the game, but was removed due to performance issues, and that it may be possible for modelers to bring it back in the future. As it stands, however, it still seems to be bad news for those who want to play "Alan Wake 2" on older generation graphics cards.

Mesh shaders were first included as part of the 2020 release of DirectX 12 Ultimate, with the first code samples released in January 2021. Mesh shaders are designed to replace traditional vertex and geometry shaders in the rendering pipeline, allowing developers to optimize the rendering process. However, this new technology requires explicit GPU support, which for Nvidia means Turing or higher, meaning RTX 20-series for Nvidia and RX 6000-series or later for AMD. If this latest information is to be believed, Alan Wake 2 completely abandons other shading formats, which may freeze users of older cards.

We have reached out to Remedy for comment, but anyone thinking of playing Alan Wake 2 will likely need to consider upgrading for multiple reasons. Whether these hardware requirements will be justified by a true next-generation graphics experience remains to be seen.