Red Dead Redemption 2 (PC) in the technology test

– Red Dead Redemption 2 for the PC is here and can finally be started reliably after several updates. It turns out that the title looks beautiful in places, but above all it requires a very fast graphics card. The many mistakes are still annoying.

Long awaited, the release of the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 brought many players and the editorial team one thing above all else: frustration. Yes, the game may have got off to the bumpiest start of all AAA productions in recent years. It didn't start on many configurations at first, or crashed in the same places. Rockstar's PC version of GTA V also suffered from technical problems, but "RDR2" clearly overshadows this.

Anyone who makes it into the game sees spectacular graphics

After several updates of the Rockstar Game Launcher and the game, Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) is now starting on most PCs and players have the chance to see what they expected: The in-house Rockstar Advanced Game, which has been bored out for the PC version Engine (RAGE) conjures up beautiful graphics on the screen in places, so that you like to stop and just look at the surroundings. The combination of great lighting, lush vegetation and the numerous other details often make your jaw drop.

Apart from the lighting, the game offers an extremely high cinematic level in the numerous playable and non-playable cutscenes, which is in no way inferior to that of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The atmosphere in the game is very dense, regardless of whether you are in a stormy snowy landscape including "tessellation footprints" or later in the thick jungle. There is enough visual variety.

Even visually weak passages are still good

Red Dead Redemption 2 cannot maintain the very high level consistently, but it still looks good in the "bad passages". The biggest problem areas are the animations, which are not particularly chic, but rather wooden. And every now and then, even in the second week after approval, even smaller graphic errors sneak into the game. But that doesn't change the fact that Red Dead Redemption 2 as a total package is currently the most beautiful PC game.

RDR2 offers DirectX 12 and Vulkan

Rockstar does without DirectX 11 in Red Dead Redemption 2. Instead, the game on the PC only uses a low-level API. DirectX 12, which only runs on Windows 10, and Vulkan, which works on all modern operating systems, are available. There is a very clear favorite, which is much better, but is not selected by the game by default – on the next page, BitcoinMinersHashrate takes a close look at the two APIs and also shows a little trick.

Even though RDR2 is probably the highlight of the year on the PC, the game is neither in AMDs nor in Nvidia's game program, but both still advertise with the title for the purchase of newer hardware. However, there are no exclusive graphic features and no ray tracing.

Graphics menus in PC games have made great strides in terms of scope, features and convenience in recent years. Unfortunately, Red Dead Redemption 2 is not one of them. Because the menu is simply too extensive and therefore very confusing. There are over 40 individual options. Even if there is a short description for each point, it is far too much. It doesn't help that there are "graphic presets", because there are not four, five or six, but the same 21, Trying out the best compromise between quality and performance can take an hour.

Even though there are many options, the only real peculiarities are in-game upsampling and downsampling. You won't find an FPS limiter, dynamic resolution or a performance HUD. Upsampling and downsampling, on the other hand, can be configured quite extensively, if not continuously. The internal rendering resolution can be reduced to 0.5 × the set value or increased to 2.5 × to improve the quality.

The 21 presets and anti-aliasing in detail

The 21 "Presets" in Red Dead Redemption 2 can be adjusted with a slider. However, Rockstar has not come up with a name for every setting, instead there are only "Prefer performance", "Balanced" and "Prefer graphic quality". Each of the three main presets is divided into 7 different settings.

If that's not enough, you can still increase the graphic details despite the highest preset. The options "reflection quality", "particle quality", "tessellation", "particle lighting quality", "water physics", "decoration quality" and "fur quality" have not yet reached their maximum and allow one, sometimes even several higher levels.

Treating all 21 presets would go beyond the scope of the article. The editorial staff is therefore limited to the minimum details (performance prefer level 1), the balanced preset (level 1), prefer image quality (level 1), prefer image quality (level 7 = highest preset) and the manually maximized details. It has to be considered that the game uses a dynamic weather simulation, which also creates a different cloud cover after loading a game – the lighting in the screenshots changes accordingly.

The differences between the presets are sometimes small

The differences between the maximum details and the highest graphics presets are very small. You have to look very closely to make any difference. The hair of the character looks a little better, especially when moving, the leaves of the trees show a little more details and the reflections are a little more chic. But you should be able to do without that.

If you switch from the highest to the lowest quality mode, you have to put up with losses in the surrounding area and the vegetation is less dense. But the differences are still small here. The differences, however, are great.

With the first balanced preset, the game looks much worse. Shadows, vegetation, surface details, visibility, reflections, everything actually looks worse and therefore the game looks much less impressive. The performance preset makes the game ugly. So while the quality preset can be used across the entire bandwidth with barely visible graphics losses, a further reduction is not sensible if you have also acquired RDR2 with a view to the graphics.

The FPS devours maximum details

Details that are maximized by hand hardly improve the graphics, but they cost a lot of performance. As a result, the Radeon RX 5700 XT loses 31 percent of its images per second, the GeForce RTX 2070 as much as 34 percent. Another reason not to.

On the other hand, if you switch back from the highest to the lowest quality preset, you hardly get any more power: The GeForce is four percent faster, the Radeon only one percent.

The lowest balanced preset, on the other hand, brings a massive boost: Both graphics cards increase by 68 percent in speed. Many games offer at most a smaller margin. In RDR2, the lowest details bring a further boost of 24 (Nvidia) and 25 percent (AMD). This triples the performance in the game. In contrast, the practically usable range with still good graphics is “only” 50 to 60 percent.

The anti-aliasing is good, but blurred

Red Dead Redemption 2 offers a lot of anti-aliasing. In addition to the post-processing variants FXAA and TAA, there are also classic MSAA in the 2 ×, 4 × and 8 × levels. In the end, only TAA is recommended. FXAA and MSAA are processing too few objects. In addition, multi-sampling anti-aliasing cost a lot of performance as usual.

In contrast, the TAA already offers very good smoothing in 1,920 × 1,080. There are hardly any flickering objects and from 2,560 × 1,440 these have almost completely disappeared. In addition, TAA hardly costs performance. However, the TAA also has a well-known catch: it places a rather violent blurring effect on the image, which is particularly pronounced in Full HD, noticeably reduced with WQHD and hardly noticeable from Ultra HD. However, this only applies to the fully used resharpening function of the TAA, which the game itself offers.

AMD and Nvidia offer (extreme) remedies

Both AMD and Nvidia also offer their own remedy regarding the blur. The driver's own Radeon Image Sharpening or Nvidia's competitor technology almost completely dispel the blur in Full HD. However, the focus filters in RDR2 work much more intensely than in most other games. As a result, the filters bring much more, but the visual style changes visibly from the game. Not everyone likes that. And Nvidia's variably adjustable level of sharpness does not change anything. So it only helps to try and see what comes closest to your own taste. The performance costs are low on both a GeForce and a Radeon.

Good textures require little memory

Red Dead Redemption 2 only gets the textures of the console version. They don't look bad and don't stand out negatively in the game world. But if you put it on it and want to take a closer look at the surface details, you will quickly find that details are missing.

The requirements for the graphics card memory are low. For maximum texture details, it doesn't need more than 6 GB even in Ultra HD, the same applies to WQHD. And in Full HD, the surfaces also fit into a 4 GB memory.

On the next page: DX12 vs. Vulkan, benchmarks in Full HD, WQHD and Ultra HD and frame times