Alan Wake: the new trailer under the microscope
Our Digital Foundry channel has taken care, in the meantime, to analyze the video in detail from a technical point of view, thanks to the precious contribution of Alex Goh.
The impressions were positive, the filming is in real time, there are large parts of the action that take place during the game phases (in addition to the introductory cut-scenes) and it is curious to note that the v-sync problems were not corrected in the final movie available on the Xbox Live Marketplace pages. Moreover, the graphic sector has already proved very solid with a superb quality level for dynamic shadows and lights.
The atmospheric effects are also to be appreciated, not only with the mist that envelops each scene but also with other elements such as cloud rendering example. The performance of the final version should be interesting. The level of post-processing is noteworthy and, flanked by the muted tones of the chromatic filters, manages to reduce aliasing problems quite well.
Investigating less evident details, even in this video specifically prepared with demonstrative purpose, some geometries in low resolution and texture filters are sometimes not particularly brilliant. However, the detail that stands out most is the screen tearing, which is quite accentuated due to the speed of 30 frames per second of the movie itself. In any case, a problem that developers will have to try to solve. It will therefore be interesting to see how the final version will be able to stand compared to the current one.
