Another aspect to note with regard to the PC edition is the content aspect, with new features for Story Mode, including:
- 3 New Bounty Hunter Missions: Capture a trio of wanted fugitives, thief Herman Zizendorf, former Confederate cavalry officer Camille de Millemont and gang leader Bart Cavanaugh.
- 2 New Gang Lairs: Take on the deadly Del Lobos gang in the new Lairs of Gaptooth Breach and Solomon's Folly.
- 2 New Treasure Maps: Follow the new Map of the Land of Wealth and Map of the Path of the Elements to find Gold Bars and other rewards.
- New mission “To the ends of the world”.
- A variety of new weapons, horses and amulets to collect.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC includes a new Photo mode enriched with a series of tools (filters, stickers and texts) to immortalize the frontier in Story mode and upload everything to the Social Club and share them. The PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 also includes Red Dead Online.
PC requirements
Below you can see the official requirements of the game communicated by Rockstar Games:
In the following table you can see what the Nvidia video card manufacturer recommends with its GeForce RTX solutions:
Settings
Rockstar Games has worked to better integrate the mouse and keyboard support, as well as controllers - which is not difficult since it is a multi-platform. As written, on the graphic front there is everything, and on this we can only say "good Rockstar", with support also for HDR for compatible monitors.
The software house has the graphic settings are divided into three macro-categories: and will give Video, where you can act on resolution and V-sync, to switch to Graphics, where you act on the general graphic preset and on three different versions of anti-aliasing - TAA, FXAA and MSAA -, in addition to the anisotropic filter.
Then there is the part Advanced Graphics which allows you to act on everything else, including choosing between the API DirectX 12 and Vulkan. The latter is the default API - at least for now - and in our tests we can say that it is also preferable at the moment.
Even if you aim for the maximum graphics preset, there will be plenty of settings set to High instead of Ultra with both MSAA and FXAA disabled.
Performances
We ran tests with Nvidia's 441.12 drivers and AMD's 19.1.1 drivers, checking how the game behaves when the video card is changed at Ultra settings.
We tried Nvidia video cards GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1080, GTX 1660 SUPER, RTX 2060, RTX 2070 SUPER and RTX 2080 Ti. On the AMD front we tried the RX 590 e la Radeon RX 5700 XT. The rest of the platform is composed as follows: Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero motherboard, Ryzen 9 3900X, 16 GB DDR4-3600 Dominator Platinum RGB from Corsair, Corsair MP600 2TB SSD.
To test the game we used the integrated benchmark, but there we are focused on the last passage in the city of St. Denis, tracked with the Nvidia FrameView tool, as the benchmark integrated in the various steps, in our opinion, does not record the real performance due to the various loads from one scene to another.
Anyway, we recorded another quirk, that is the test scene changes every now and then: despite this there is no real impact on the final performance, but we do not hide from you that we laughed at the always different way in which horses die after the protagonist throws a stick of dynamite towards the police carriage.
Sometimes the camera focuses only on Arthur, and he sometimes loses his hat and other times he doesn't, or “runs around empty in place” at a certain moment. In short, there are some quirks that we hope will be corrected.
Graphics
We took a few screenshots at four different graphics settings, just touching the slider relative to the general quality preset (which consequently acts on the remaining voices), to show you how the graphics change. Above you can see where we have positioned the slider, while below the screenshots in order - from left to right - from lowest quality to highest quality:
The lowest level of detail and the one immediately following degrade the graphics quality quite noticeably, with much less detailed textures and lighting that blurs the surroundings. In our opinion, the third preset, the medium-high one (called Balanced) if we can define it that way, is the one we would aim for because it does not affect the graphic quality of the game in an evident way compared to the maximum one.
It must be said that this is the highest quality of the Balanced level. In this detail, the performance achieved by video cards is the same as at maximum quality, so to gain some FPS we suggest you keep a few steps below our setting, so as not to compromise the quality too much and increase the frame rate.
Conclusions
What do these results tell us? That Rockstar Games perhaps needed more time to optimize the game and especially to work with Nvidia and AMD on graphics drivers. A patch has arrived in the last few hours, but by the software house's own admission there is still a lot to do.
“We know that some players are still experiencing stuttering issues on Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC. We think this is due to some unexpected problems related to specific combinations of Nvidia graphics drivers, Nvidia video cards and some CPUs. […] We are working with Nvidia to permanently fix this in a future update. It may take a couple of days to run the necessary tests and make sure that the update resolves the problem permanently ”.
“We apologize for this temporary unforeseen event: we will update you as soon as we have more news. We want everyone to be able to experience Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC as quickly as possible and to the best of their ability. "
A mea culpa that does honor, which however does not cancel the initial stability problems and the not flawless optimization. This is why we recommend the game to those who have a PC that is up to it, and we suggest that you give Rockstar time to fix the bugs, after which it could become a really good Christmas present.
Red Dead Redemption 2 tested on PC: performance with different video cards
