Red Dead Redemption 2 is Rockstar Games’ latest heavyweight, with nearly 40K concurrent players even five years after the (staggered) PC launch. Despite that, it can be a challenge to run the game on midrange and low-end PCs. RDR2 got NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR 2 support in the months following the initial launch after a widespread backlash from Steam users. Fast forward to the present day, and most of the technical issues have been resolved. Let’s try and break down Arthur’s world into different visual techniques and resolutions.
Windows/System Settings to Optimize
Enable Resizable BAR.
Turn on Game Mode.
Enable Hardware-accelerated GPU Scheduling (HAGS) and Windowed Optimizations.
Use the Windows “High Performance” power profile and set your GPU power management mode to the same.
Disable Memory Integrity. Windows Menu->VBS->Device Security.
Ensure you use the proper XMP/EXPO memory profile (if available).
Overclock your GPU if you’re narrowly missing the 60 FPS mark.
The PC system requirements for Red Dead Redemption 2 are fairly modest. You need a quad or hex-core CPU released in the last 5 years alongside a GeForce GTX 1060 or a Radeon RX 480. On the memory side, 8 GB is the bare minimum, but 12 GB is recommended. The storage requirement comes in at a whopping 150 GB:
The “Ultra” quality graphics preset was chosen as the reference point at 4K “native”.
The following hardware setup was used:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X.
Cooler: Lian Li Galahad 360 AIO.
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 FE.
Motherboard: MSI MPG X670E Carbon WiFi.
Memory: 16 GB x2 @ 6000 MT/s CL30.
Red Dead Redemption 2: Resolution & Upscaling
Red Dead Redemption 2 scales fairly well with resolution, averaging 80 FPS at 4K, 116.5 FPS at 1440p, and 137 FPS at 4K UHD. The 1% lows varied from 52 FPS to 67 FPS and 84 FPS at the three resolutions.
Red Dead Redemption 2 features many anti-aliasing options on PC, including NVIDIA DLSS 2 and AMD FSR 2. Older options include MSAA (multi-sampling), FXAA (fast approximate AA), and TAA (temporal AA). Objectively speaking, MSAA produces the sharpest textures but doesn’t cover transparent ones including grass and vegetation. FXAA is effective at 1080p but blurs detailed textures at 1440p and 4K.
DLSSFSR
That leaves us with TAA which works well across all resolutions and its upscaling derivatives, namely DLSS and FSR. All three come with a sharpness slider to address the resultant blurring, but DLSS produces the best quality retaining more detail with complex objects like grass, bushes, and branch ends.
Red Dead Redemption 2: DX12 or Vulkan Graphics API?
Red Dead Redemption 2 lets you choose between Vulkan and DirectX 12 in the advanced graphics. By default, the former is selected, and choosing the latter requires you to unlock the advanced section. Vulkan produces similar averages as DX12, but vastly superior lows thanks to the reduced CPU overhead.
Since CPU overhead plays a partin upscaling, we observed that Vulkan also delivers smoother 1% frametimes with DLSS and FSR enabled. We’re talking about gains of up to 30% or more which can drastically alter (improve) your experience. Ergo, stick to Vulkan.
Texture Quality & Anisotropic Filtering
As tradition dictates, “Texture quality” and “Anisotropic filtering” are first on the list of graphics options. The former sets the quality or resolution of in-game textures (object skins) and directly depends on how much VRAM (graphics memory) you’ve got on your graphics card.
Red Dead Redemption 2 requires an 8 GB graphics card for optimal performance. Even running the game at 1080p or 1440p uses 7-8 GB of VRAM at the higher quality presets.
Texture filtering or anisotropic filtering continuously samples texture maps farther away from the camera (player viewport) to retain detail and avoid blurring (most common with maps perpendicular to the screen).
Texture filtering ensures that texture maps (mipmaps) retain their detail. Mipmaps are usually smaller than the original texture by a factor of 2 and there are points (texels) where multiple mipmaps may converge. These must be filtered to avoid blurring and other artifacts.
Bilinear filtering, the simplest form of texture filtering, takes four texel samples from the approximate position of the texel and calculates its average which is used as the final value. Bilinear filtering only uses texels from mipmaps identified by the game engine.
Trilinear filtering improves on bilinear filtering by continuously sampling and interpolating (averaging) texels from the two closest mipmaps for the target texel, but like BF, it assumes that the texture is displayed as a square from the player’s perspective, failing when viewed from an angle perpendicular to the screen.
This is due to the texel covering a depth (area along the axis perpendicular to the screen) longer than and a width narrower than the samples extracted from the mipmaps, resulting in blurring due to under and over-sampling, respectively.
Anisotropic Filtering scales either the height or width of a mipmap by a ratio relative to the texture’s angle against the screen. The ratio is dependent on the maximum sampling value specified, followed by taking the appropriate samples. It varies between 1 (no scaling) & 16, defining the maximum degree by which a mipmap can be scaled.
The difference between these settings is the maximum angle that AF will filter the texture by. For example, 4x will filter textures at angles twice as steep as 2x, but will still apply standard 2x filtering to textures within the 2x range to optimize performance.
Lighting & Global Illumination
Red Dead Redemption 2 offers two ways to alter the lighting quality of a scene. These include “Lighting Quality” and “Global Illumination Quality.”
Lighting Quality adjusts the resolution of direct lighting in the scene, covering the sun, moon, or any man-made light sources. The impact is most prominent at night or in dimly lit areas.
Lighting Quality
Global illumination sets the quality of indirect lighting which has a more subtle impact on the visual fidelity, often making darker areas brighter by tracing more obscure light rays. It is also most evident indoors and in darker areas with fewer direct light sources.
Global illumination
Shadows Quality, Soft Shadows & Far/Long Shadows
Red Dead Redemption 2 lets you adjust the shadow quality in five different ways on PC. This includes Shadow Quality, Far Shadows, Long Shadows, Soft Shadows, and Grass Shadows. The first two are available in the main graphics menu, while the remaining can be found under “Advanced Graphics.”
Shadow Quality
Shadow quality sets the resolution of shadow maps, making the shadows more detailed. It primarily affects the graphics memory usage, with a slight reduction in lows. The ultra quality can drastically impact lows (5-10%).
Far Shadow Quality
Long shadows enable more elongated sunrise/sunset shadows. Along with “Far Shadows,” they have a notable impact on the minimum frame rates and 1% lows.
Long ShadowsSoft Shadows
Soft shadows produce more accurate shadow silhouettes, making the edges smoother and less pronounced. This is usually implemented where the shadows are farther away from the caster. They drastically reduce performance on low-end and midrange machines.
Grass shadows can have a notable impact on visual fidelity at the cost of ~13% lower minimum framerates and a 3-5% reduction in averages.
Grass Shadows
Reflections & Ambient Occlusion
Red Dead Redemption 2 handles reflections cast by mirrors, water, and other glossy objects separately:
Mirror reflections don’t affect general performance.
Reflection Quality adjusts the quality of low-resolution (diffuse) reflections cast on bottles, metal objects, and other glassy surfaces.
Disabling “Reflection MSAA” saves a lot of performance at roughly the same quality.Reflection Quality
SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) enables secondary shadows along edges, crevices, and corners. The standard options have a nominal impact on performance.
You can enable ‘Full Resolution SSAO” under the advanced section for fuller, dark shadows at the cost of 13% lower minimums and 8% average framerates. Its quality and performance rely on your input resolution.
SSAO Quality
Water Quality: Reflection, Refraction & Physics
Water quality sets the resolution of water reflections, refractions (caustics), and physics (waves). Each of these can be individually set under the advanced section for a subtle performance trade-off.
Water Quality
Volumetrics: Fog, Clouds & Godrays
Volumetrics set the quality of clouds, fog, and godrays. Lower values produce blurred/pixelated output, with high/ultra rendering clearer effects.
High seems to be the sweet spot.
Ultra can be a substantial drain on your GPU.
Volumetrics Quality
Near Volumetric Resolution (Advanced Graphics) sets the resolution of volumetrics resolution for nearby godrays and fog, and can be maxed out on most PCs.
Far Volumetric Resolution can be safely reduced to lower values without an apparent drop in visual fidelity, as it only impacts fog and cloud quality in the far distance.
Unlocked Volumetric Resolution is another setting in the Advanced section that can be used to enable full-resolution volumetric lighting, producing smoother and more realistic godrays that become more detailed at higher resolutions. It can be quite taxing on low and midrange GPUs.
Volumetric Lighting in the advanced section sets the quality of godrays produced at sunrise and sunset. It can have a pronounced impact on performance, and is best left at “High.”
Geometric Detail, Grass & Vegetation LOD
Red Dead Redemption 2 offers three options to set the draw distance (LOD) of different objects, including man-made settlements, trees, grass, and other vegetation:
Geometry LOD sets the rendering distance of towns, horsecarts, and other structures. It subtly impacts performance.
Geometry LOD
Grass LOD sets the draw distance of grass patches leading to increased pop-ins at lower settings and barren lands in the distance. It drastically improves the visual fidelity at a minimal performance charge.
Grass LOD
Tree quality is the third LOD setting that sets the render distance of trees, bushes, and other natural vegetation. High offers the best balance before quality and performance, as ultra can drain up to 10% of your low framerates.
Tree Quality LOD
Fur, Parallax Mapping & Tessellation
The fur setting sets the detail of fur coats and any furry wildlife roaming the wilderness. In most cases, you won’t feel its impact so leave it as is.
Parallax mapping is a technique used to create detail out of 2D geometry using normal maps. It is a cheap method of improving the quality of flat textures without much of a performance loss.
Parallax Mapping
Tessellation quality sets the polygon density of trees, mud, and other deformable surfaces. It’s used sparingly, mostly on tree trunks which can be disabled for a healthy FPS boost of up to ~10% or more.
Tessellation Quality
Particle Quality & Decals
Particle quality sets the resolution of particles, including embers, smoke, and dust matter. It marginally affects performance for most users.
Particle lighting quality sets the resolution of textures used for particle lighting. It leads to a more cinematic experience at a minimal performance hit.
Decals set the details of bullet holes, impact marks, and other player/NPC-made impacts on walls and surfaces. The performance impact is negligible.
Red Dead Redemption 2: VRAM Usage
Red Dead Redemption 2 uses up to 9 GB of graphics memory at 4K, 8.25 GB at 1440p, and 8 GB at 1080p using the “Ultra” quality settings (without upscaling). Enabling DLSS or FSR reduces the VRAM usage by 500-600 MB, so you should be good with an 8 GB graphics card even at 4K.
Red Dead Redemption 2: CPU Bottlenecks
Red Dead Redemption 2 is slightly to moderately CPU-bound depending on your hardware and the graphics API used. In general, Vulkan has a lower CPU overhead than DirectX 12 with a GPU-Busy deviation of 3-5%, versus 7-10% on the latter.
The most taxing graphics settings in Red Dead Redemption 2 are mentioned below. They can reduce your framerates by 10-20% at 4K and should be disabled or reduced to medium or low. We recommend disabling the last three and reducing the first three.
Reflections.
Tree Tessellation.
SSAO.
Reflection MSAA.
Full-Res SSAO.
Unlocked Volumetric Raymarched Resolution.
Optimized Settings for Red Dead Redemption 2 PC (2024)
Red Dead Redemption 2: RDR2 Settings for Low-end PC
Red Dead Redemption 2 averages over 50 FPS (1440p) and 70 FPS (1080p) on the RTX 3060 using our optimized settings. The primary tweaks involve reducing global illumination, tessellation, and volumetric quality to “High.” The reflection quality also has to be turned down to “Medium.”
The GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU averaged 71 FPS and 63 FPS at 1200p and 1600p, respectively.
The game is completely GPU-bound even on budget hex-core CPUs, and tends to use approximately 6 GB of graphics memory at 1080p and 1440p. Here’s our mini-guide for a detailed look at the game’s performance on low-end PCs.
Graphics Settings
RTX 3060
RTX 3060 Ti
RTX 4060
Resolution
1080p|1440p
1080p|1440p
1080p|1440p
Target FPS
60 FPS
60 FPS
60 FPS
Texture Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Anisotropic Filtering
16x
16x
16x
Lighting Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Global Illumination Quality
High
High
High
Shadow Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Far Shadow Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Reflection Quality
High|Medium
High
Medium|Low
Mirror Quality
Up to you
Up to you
Up to you
Water Quality
High
High
High
Volumetrics Quality
High
Ultra
Custom
Particle Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
Tessellation Quality
Ultra
Ultra
Ultra
NVIDIA DLSS
Balanced|Performance
Balanced|Performance
Quality|Balanced
DLSS/FSR Sharpening
Optional
Optional
Optional
TAA
Off
Off
Off
FXAA
Off
Off
Off
MSAA
Off
Off
Off
Red Dead Redemption 2: Best Steam Deck Graphics Settings
Processors, PC gaming, and the past. I have been writing about computer hardware for over seven years with more than 5000 published articles. Started off during engineering college and haven't stopped since. Find me at HardwareTimes and PC Opset.
