
Even five years since its official release, Red Dead Redemption 2 remains among the most-played games on Steam. It landed as a broken PC port, disappointing many, but most bugs were ironed out within the same year. We analyzed the game’s performance on our primary setup a couple of months back, hitting 100 FPS at 4K “Ultra” with relative ease. This post is our RDR2 settings guide for budget and low-end PCs
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.
- Here’s a guide with more detailed instructions.
Red Dead Redemption 2 PC System Requirements
Red Dead Redemption 2 has fairly modest system requirements. 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. You’ll also need 150 GB of (preferably SSD) storage.

Our Test Setup
Motherboard | CPU | GPU | Memory |
---|---|---|---|
GIGABYTE B450M DS3H WIFI ($84) | AMD Ryzen 5 5600 ($116) | NVIDIA RTX 3060 12 GB ($269) NVIDIA RTX 4060 8 GB ($284) | 8GB x2 D4 ($40) |
Alienware x14 | Intel Core i7-13620H | NVIDIA RTX 4060 Laptop GPU | 8 GB x4 DDR5 @ 4800 MT/s |
Red Dead Redemption 2: Low-end PC Benchmarks
Red Dead Redemption 2 averages over 50 FPS (1440p) and 70 FPS (1080p) on the RTX 3060 using our optimized graphics settings. The primary changes involve reducing global illumination, tessellation, and volumetric quality to “High.” The reflection quality has to be turned down to “Medium.” The rest is a buttery smooth 60 FPS+ experience that looks nearly as good as “Ultra.”

The Alienware x14 fares extremely well despite its higher screen resolution. We recorded average framerates of 71 FPS and 63 FPS at 1200p and 1600p, respectively. The GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU handles RDR2 like a piece of cake, and because it’s completely GPU-bound there aren’t any stutters.

VRAM Usage & CPU Bottlenecks
Red Dead Redemption 2 uses roughly 6 GB of graphics memory (at 1080p/1440p) on the GeForce RTX 3060 and the RTX 4060 laptop GPU. You face any VRAM limitations on a 6 GB VRAM buffer.

The game utilizes multi-core CPUs fairly well. All our test setups were completely GPU-bound with a GPU-Busy deviation of less than 2% across all scenarios.

Red Dead Redemption 2: RDR2 Settings for Low-end PC
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 |
Tesselation 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 |