Alan Wake 2 set such a high technical bar last year that few games in 2024 came anywhere near, but it wasn't all abject disappointment

HardwareAlan Wake 2 set such a high technical bar last year that few games in 2024 came anywhere near, but it wasn’t all abject disappointmentWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: MachineGames)

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle screenshot

Gear of the Year(Image credit: Future)Check out more of the year’s best tech in ourPC Gamer Hardware Awards 2024coverage.

Gear of the Year

(Image credit: Future)Check out more of the year’s best tech in ourPC Gamer Hardware Awards 2024coverage.

(Image credit: Future)

PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2024 logo on a black background

Check out more of the year’s best tech in ourPC Gamer Hardware Awards 2024coverage.

Alan Wake 2appeared so late last year that you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was a 2024 launch. You’d also be forgiven for believing that its outstanding visual design and use of ray tracing would be a standard consistently achieved this year. Alas, for everything that I’ve seen and analysed these past 12 months, Remedy’s masterpiece is still the bar that others have failed to reach.

Image1of2Dragon’s Dogma 2(Image credit: Capcom)Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition(Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

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Dragon’s Dogma 2(Image credit: Capcom)Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition(Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Dragon’s Dogma 2(Image credit: Capcom)

A screenshot of Dragon’s Dogma 2, using the game’s photo mode and maximum graphics settings

Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition(Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

A screenshot of Horizon Forbidden West, using the game’s photo mode and maximum graphics settings

As the original game never used ray tracing, the developers sensibly chose to not make any attempt to integrate it in the conversion. Instead, it focused on improving the fundamental assets, as well as implementing upscaling and frame generation to boost performance, rather than offset any heavy-handed rendering technology.

The game might not be to everyone’s taste and it’s not as good as the first Horizon Zero Dawn, but in terms of technical achievement, Nixxes knocked it out of the park.

The same was true of another PlayStation port,Ghost of Tsushimain May, which—surprise, surprise—was another Nixxes project. No ray tracing, just good ol' traditional rendering done well. Admittedly, when it comes to surface reflections, once you’ve seen what ray tracing can do in this aspect, going back to screen space reflections just feels yuck.

Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut(Image credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

A screenshot of Ghost of Tsushima, using maximum quality graphics and the game’s photo mode

The first 2024 games to heavily feature ray tracing took a while to make an appearance, but in August,Black Myth: WukongandStar Wars Outlawswere the first big releases to be ray-tracedonly. Not the first games ever, mind, but you get what I mean.

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Wukong uses Unreal Engine 5, whereas Outlaws runs on the same engine asAvatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but both exhibited the most common traits of the year: Variable performance, traversal stutter, interminable shader compilation, and an almost necessary use of upscaling to achieve any semblance of a decent frame rate.

Image1of2Black Myth: Wukong(Image credit: GameScience)Star Wars Outlaws(Image credit: Ubisoft)

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Black Myth: Wukong(Image credit: GameScience)Star Wars Outlaws(Image credit: Ubisoft)

Black Myth: Wukong(Image credit: GameScience)

A screenshot of Black Myth: Wukong, using the game’s photo mode

Star Wars Outlaws(Image credit: Ubisoft)

A screenshot of Star Wars Outlaws, using the game’s photo mode

At least one could say that on maximum settings with Full Ray Tracing (aka path tracing) enabled, Wukong’s visuals justified the performance. That’s not something that could be said for Outlaws, though it does run a lot better now after several patches.

While it is simpler for developers to just focus on one rendering pipeline, I feel that we’re still at least one generation of GPUs away from ray tracing being the acceptable norm for games to use exclusively.

Image1of3Silent Hill 2(Image credit: Konami Digital Entertainment)God of War Ragnarök(Image credit: Sony Santa Monica)Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2(Image credit: Sabre Interactive)

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Silent Hill 2(Image credit: Konami Digital Entertainment)God of War Ragnarök(Image credit: Sony Santa Monica)Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2(Image credit: Sabre Interactive)

Silent Hill 2(Image credit: Konami Digital Entertainment)

A screenshot of Silent Hill 2 remake

God of War Ragnarök(Image credit: Sony Santa Monica)

god of war ragnarok

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2(Image credit: Sabre Interactive)

Screenshot from Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 showing the main character standing in front of a landing craft

‘Good enough’ is probably the phrase that the developers of theSilent Hill 2 remakesarcastically said after finishing its PC version because while that’s been one of my favourite games of 2024, it’s a shocking mess on the humble PC.

For example, I had to copy one file from a folder in the game’s installation and paste it into the main folder just so it would start. Then I had to deal with so many visual glitches and frame rate jank that I genuinely thought I was playing a beta release. It’s a superb remake and worthy of all its acclaim, but I have little praise for the PC conversion.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024(Image credit: Xbox Game Studios)

A screenshot of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, using the game’s photo mode

A screenshot of Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl

Anyway, to be fair, both games aren’t too bad on a high-end gaming PC but anything sporting hardware at the bottom end of the system requirements is going to require every ounce of upscaling and frame generation to run smoothly.

Given all that had transpired, I had few hopes forIndiana Jones and the Great Circle, especially when I learned that it would always be using ray tracing, as well as having a path tracing mode. Sorry, Full Ray Tracing. Well, glaze me in honey and call me Susan, how wrong I was.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

A screenshot of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

Well,mostlywrong. Great Circle runs pretty well, even on low-end hardware (though the GPU must have ray tracing hardware), and if you can get the Full Path Tracing mode to run nicely, then it’salmostas impressive as Alan Wake 2. And it’s packed with lots of nice touches, such as the way the game loads a previous save as the main menu. Sadly, it is pretty glitchy and it’s taken a few patches to make frame generation work as intended.

At least it wasn’t another Unreal Engine 5 game but anyone expectingDoom Eternallevels of performance just because it uses the ID Tech 7 engine is in for a shock. The game itself is a huge amount of fun, at least,andlooks pretty darn nice.

PC Gamer 2024 Game Performance Analysis

Looking ahead to the first half of 2025, we’ve got somebiggames incomingthat are going to sport cutting-edge graphics: Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, Civilization 7, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, The Last of Us Part 2, to mention but a few.

If any of them are going to do really well on PC, I hope the developers have looked carefully at what’s gone right and what’s gone poorly with this year’s releases.

Always-on ray tracing isn’t necessarily a bad thing but shoehorning in an all-singing path tracing mode just seems to be a recipe for disaster at the moment, as so few GPUs can really handle it. But even with traditional rendering techniques, it’s still possible to end up with a stuttery, unplayable mess and relying on upscaling and frame generation to mask such issues isn’t acceptable.

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