Red Dead Redemption 2: PC graphics performance benchmark review - Image Quality and System requirements

Image quality settings and benchmark system

Rockstar Games offers the impressive Wild West gigantic, open game world with high visibility, tens of thousands of lifelike animations and a level of detail, never experienced before in a game. On the PC there is native 4K resolution with refresh rates of up to 120 frames per second - on the console, that is 30. And where on console far-off details sink into the fog , they can still be seen on the PC treetops at a distant distance. Shrubs, grasses and other vegetation appear much denser; Characters, carriages, buildings or the muddy ground in the town of Valentine are crisp. There are also significant increases in terms of lighting and effects: Metal objects such as the chain of gang leader Dutch, for example, now seem more realistic. Putz crumbles under fire from the walls, the coating of wild animals is fluffier than console. In addition, the ambient occultation has significantly upgraded, the shadow quality increases, tesselation is added. Improved details such as the greasy, correspondingly shiny skin of the contestants benefit the cinematic dialogue scenes. 

Beware of your SSD: After unlocking the game requires 100 to 150 GB on your hard drive, roughly 50 more than on console.

Quality modes

The gamer offers no multiple quality modes bit a slider with preferences that will automatically select settings, we'll show you the perf and quality benefits on the next page.  Below are the preliminary test settings, which in retrospect are too hard and harsh.

Red Dead Redemption II can use of DirectX 12 as well as Vulkan, in our preliminary testing it did not result in much of a difference, in fact, DX12 was a notch faster. We do have a fast 9900K processor though.   

In the article, we'll also peek at performance with different quality modes, and obviously VSYNC disabled.

The graphics cards tested

In this article, we'll make use of the following cards at a properly good PC experience graphics quality wise, the quality mode as shown above with Vsync disabled (which needs to be done by editing a configuration file). The graphics cards used in this test are: