Conclusion

Red Dead Redemption 2 has been out on console for quite a while—now, Rockstar brought their smash hit to the PC platform. The game revolves around a group of bandits in the Wild West that is struggling to make ends meet now that law enforcement has started cracking down on their illegal activities. Stuck in a frosty winter, you first have to provide shelter for your group, which is comprised of vulnerable women, too, who, as you'll realize later, aren't as brittle and innocent as they first seem. Once that challenge is solved, you have to rebuild your camp and bring finances up to sustainable levels. This means you have to launch small crime operations and expand to bigger robberies and heists further down the road to rake in the money.

Gameplay is similar to Grand Theft Auto, just in a more historical setting. The game also feels a bit like the Witcher 3, Skyrim, or other similar open-world RPGs. Red Dead Redemption 2 is definitely open world; it comes with a huge map that is for you to explore. Whether you follow the main story or roam on your own, what you encounter is always interesting; character backstories are interesting, too. Both the main story and side quests are captivating and varied, especially the optional missions are well scripted. Unlike other RPG titles, there is no "fetch quest" spam. Character development happens mostly automatically—you gain experience for doing certain things and a related skill goes up over time, which is a welcome change from classic skill trees.

Now, all of that sounds really good, and I am sure you've read some of the raving reviews, which I agree with mostly. I can see why the game is receiving so much praise, but I also absolutely hate some decisions made by the developer. No doubt, the world looks gorgeous and is fun to explore, but after a while, all the horseback riding between quest locations made me feel like this is Rockstar's approach to increasing total playtime. Later in the game you can discover fast travel, which lets you skip some of the riding simulator, but it's not nearly as convenient as in other titles. Interacting with NPCs is just as slow-paced; there's no way to skip or complete lines of dialog, only the whole conversation, sometimes. Besides crafting, cooking, and fishing, you can play a lot of mini-games in RDR2, like domino, poker, and blackjack. Many are enjoyable concept-wise, but suck because they progress SO slowly, and, you guessed it, there is no way to skip their animations. The same goes for character movement speed, which feels like molasses. I even tried to use Cheat Engine's speed hack feature to bring things out of snail's pace, but without much success. For some reason, after a while, your character will randomly get stuck while walking/riding, almost like they wanted to soft-block speed hacks without showing a big red "stop using cheats" alert.

RDR2 is clearly a console port, and a bad one. My impression is that there has been zero focus on polish for players using keyboard and mouse. The movement controls are sluggish and imprecise, and your character often gets stuck around objects. The keymap isn't really intuitive, and there are a lot of bound keys that seem to follow no clear concept. Rather, it almost looks like gamepad buttons were translated to random keys on the keyboard. Sometimes, the prompts don't even match what is displayed on screen: "hold Escape"; well, actually, you need to hold F... . Inventory management is horrible, too. While you do have a mouse cursor to navigate menus, clicking on a consumable doesn't select it, but uses it up immediately. Not sure how nobody noticed that in QA testing. The map can be zoomed out with the mouse wheel, but zoom speed is incredibly slow, requiring crazy mouse wheel spinning to give you an overview; again, nobody noticed that? Then there's the myriad of crash issues people are reporting in the launcher and during game start and gameplay. It seems owners of AMD processors are especially affected. Surely someone tested the game on a Ryzen system? I'm lucky I didn't encounter a single crash in all the hours spent playing and benchmarking, but given the amount of drama online, it seems I'm the exception, not the norm.

As you've seen from our screenshots, graphics are probably the best in any PC game ever. The great wilderness of the 19th century United States is modeled richly and beautifully. You are treated with topnotch shadows and lighting effects—neither of which require RTX raytracing. Not only the graphics look great, the animations are also incredibly detailed and smooth; fur rendering on animals rivals tech demos from a couple of years ago. While we usually complain that we'd like to see higher resolution textures, RDR2 is an exception. Textures are well-detailed, and I've yet to come across a noteworthy number of textures that end up blurry because you walk up too closely. I also have to applaud Rockstar for supporting both DirectX 12 and Vulkan in the title.

Looking at performance numbers is shocking at first. The game has insane hardware requirements, probably making it the next "Can it run Crysis?" meme. On the other hand, having options that go beyond what today's hardware is capable of can be a good thing as it ensures gamers who check out the title in a year or two will be able to dial up fidelity even further. It seems that's exactly what Rockstar was thinking, because there are a ton of graphics options for you to play with to fine-tune the graphics to exactly your requirements. We benchmarked actual gameplay at the highest preset (which doesn't max out all the settings)—the in-game benchmark spits out numbers that aren't that realistic. In order to get close to 60 FPS at 1080p Full HD, you need a GeForce RTX 2070 or Radeon RX 5700 XT. 1440p@60 is reserved for NVIDIA gamers using the RTX 2080 Super or RTX 2080 Ti. AMD's flagship, the Radeon VII, achieves only 54 FPS at that resolution. For 4K at 60 FPS, you'll have to wait for next-gen hardware or dial down the settings —the RTX 2080 Ti reached 45.5 FPS, and SLI isn't supported.

Looking at our new "performance relative to TPU graphics card review" charts reveals that you can roughly expect half the FPS you're used to no matter the GPU vendor or the actual card. AMD's cards seem to do a little bit better here than what NVIDIA offers, especially Pascal cards experience a few percent higher performance loss, and even more when using DirectX 12. Both vendors have released game-ready drivers for Red Dead Redemption 2, both showing similar levels of optimization, with AMD having a slight edge. For example, the Radeon RX 5700 XT does realtively well, matching the RTX 2070 Super. Maybe that's because the game was optimized for the GCN architecture in consoles. Still, and I'm not blaming GPU vendors, running at half the FPS without providing anything that looks "twice as good" qualifies as "bad optimization" by Rockstar in my book. 4K Ultra 60 FPS is "impossible" with current-gen GPUs without some serious overclocking. Our mighty RTX 2080 Ti barely manages 50 fps, and we doubt the TITAN RTX will be 20% faster for that magic 60 fps threshold, without overclocking.

We also took a closer look at the APIs offered: Vulkan and DirectX 12. While there are some subtle differences in performance, the differences aren't big enough to declare either a winner over the other except for with Pascal, where you should use Vulkan. While the other cards do gain a few FPS with DirectX 12, I did notice some minor issues with the API, so my recommendation is to stick to Vulkan on both AMD and NVIDIA. VRAM usage is surprisingly well behaved even though textures and models are richly detailed. Even at 4K we measured only 5.5 GB usage, so all cards should be fine VRAM-wise. While the aging GeForce GTX 1060 3 GB and Radeon RX 570 4 GB run fine at 1080p Vulkan with the highest details, the game would crash on both cards when 1440p and beyond was used. With DirectX 12, these two cards would crash all the time at the same settings due to lack of memory, despite similar memory allocation.

Overall, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a very promising game that will keep you busy for a long time if Rockstar can fix all the issues. Right now, the game is sold on Epic Games Store and Rockstar's own launcher, and the Steam version is coming in a month. I'd say definitely wait for the Steam version, or even for discounts next year.