Red Dead Redemption 2 FIXED on Steam Deck! | Deck Dive

welcome everyone to cryobite33's technical Red Dead Redemption 2 deep dive Extravaganza today we're going over every possible performance boost I could get in Red Dead 2 on Steam deck some from previous videos some improvements to existing processes even some weird ones we have more than ever to cover today so let's get into the video but first a bit of news and there's only one bit today I have a patreon now I was originally only gonna stick to YouTube memberships but several viewers asked if you could support me on patreon instead patreon has a really good membership structure so I think I was able to start with some cool perks if you end up supporting me some of them are a patron shout out in each video Behind the Scenes content exclusive voting on future content priority content requests and a monthly Patron only live stream also you get to support me doing this I spent more than 20 hours on just benchmarking in this video so every little bit will help me get more equipment and make this channel better all tiers of supporter will have their names right off at the end of each video so you can be part of this Channel's history if you decide to support me on patreon the link is in the video description below just as a heads up I'm thinking of more ways to reward you in the future and I have some ideas one idea that was recommended to me by the viewer named The 100 ways that I think would be really cool is a custom steam deck boot video so let me know if that's something you'd be interested in down in the comments with that out of the way let's talk benchmarks as usual if you just want the presets and don't care about how I got there then use the chapters to skip to the preset section later in the video so the first thing that I needed to do was verify that the built-in Benchmark could be trusted in order to do this I ran a full Suite of tests in The Benchmark and then I also did a lap around strawberry during the day unfortunately for me the built-in Benchmark is off by seven to nineteen percent in my initial review of Red Dead I had assumed that Rockstar verified The Benchmark is accurate but it appears that it is by no means a realistic portrayal of game performance this means that my prior gains may or may not still be valid and everything will need to be tested thoroughly in this video before moving on to how I actually performed the benchmarks I wanted to show the actual graph of the results here I truncated it slightly to make it easier to read but you can see that performance differs significantly even during the harder to run parts of the built-in Benchmark going on this I decided to run this lap around strawberry for each Benchmark it contains enough AI water foliage and geometry to be a realistic depiction of the worst gameplay that red dead can throw at you I briefly tested the same settings in the wilderness around horseshoe Overlook and also in the dense city of Saint Denis the Wilderness usually gained three to four frames over strawberry and Saint Denis usually lost about two frames so I'm fairly confident that my testing Nails the average frame rate of the game as for what I call the presets they're just certain points on the quality preset level bar low is the far left of the bar medium is the first tick of the bar marked as balanced high is the first tick of the bar marked as favor quality and Ultra is the far right of the bar unless otherwise specified I made no changes to any settings and I played at the native resolution solution as always let's start out with a baseline this is stock in every way and as we can see it follows an expected curve nothing to write home about but the only absolute unplayable preset is ultra moving on to identifying the bottleneck and we can see that in general CPU use is higher on Lower presets that makes sense given the higher frame rates looking at the GPU core clock we can see that Ultra is the only one really stressing the GPU too much we might be able to get a boost out of pinning the GPU clock so we'll have to test that later on default the vram is pretty much saturated on all settings so the vram fix might help but we'll also need to check that later the RAM usage is pretty high across the board but never seems to be maxed out this means that the swap fix could help but likely only in CPU bound scenarios or if the GPU is hogging a ton of memory with us finding that nearly anything could give us a little bit of performance let's move on to four gigs of vram the next few fixes will be taken from my easy performance boosts video so please go check that out if you want to know how to perform them or how they work this is officially the first time on the channel That expanding vram to four gigs is worse than default and by worse I mean horrible I reverted my deck back to steamos 3.3.1 with the recovery ISO I had on hand and I applied my swap fix as a test to see if it has always been an issue and it's definitely new in 3.3.2 it seems that the fix they implemented to fix Red Dead in the latest release is causing the vram expansion to harm performance aggressively let's briefly look into why it's worse though the first thing that jumped out at me is this graph it shows that the CPU just doesn't work as hard with the fix in place for some reason here we can see that all the presets are relatively similar except for low with 4 gigabytes of vram I have no idea why the footage is identical minus an extra horse in sound but the GPU just wants nothing to do with working something that struck me as odd was that even though the GPU wasn't really working that hard the temperature stayed the same and same with the CPU neither seemed to drop significantly in temperature but they only worked a fraction as hard especially odd is this graph or we can see that the GPU is sipping only two watts of power with the four gigabytes of vram setting yet still getting similar temperatures moving on a bit to see if we can find the bottleneck it looks like we're using basically all of the vram we can get so we think that that would benefit performance but despite that the GPU is only consuming four gigs of memory the CPU is only using eight to nine gigs for a total of 12 to 13 gigs I spun the game up in desktop mode so I could use a system-wide memory Monitor and confirm that there's usually two or three gigs of RAM free at any time while using 4 gigs of vram for some reason so what's happening here if you're subscribed and saw my community post this week then you likely already know as of the latest Steam OS update using one gigabyte of vram will actually Force Red Dead to use up to six gigabytes of vram instead of the normal 8 gigabytes setting the vram to any other value in BIOS causes the vram to be 100 Locked to that value instead not allowing for expansion past what's supposed to be the minimum this means that you can either choose to have up to six gigabytes of vram or a locked value at 4 gigabytes or lower no wonder why the GPU couldn't work the game isn't feeding it anything to work on I'm not sure about you but I 100 classify this as a bug as it stands we can't effectively use all eight gigabytes of possible vram and we can't even specify a minimum unfortunately this rules pretty much anything out to do with the vram fix so we're gonna have to move on to some other deck tweaks that might be able to notice a few more frames moving on to the swap fix also showcased in my easy performance boosts video I set my swap file to 16 gigs my vram back to 1 gig and ran the tests again we can see that the results are five percent worse on low and 72 percent lower on the high preset that is massive but it shows that the issue is probably the amount of swapping going on editing Kyle here the high preset being so low actually seems to be something else that I mentioned later in the video it's just an extremely busy scene and is kind of a red herring here but we're gonna move on anyway because the end result is the same alright back to the show we'll Tinker with this in a bit but let's have a little fun and see how bad both fixes are together no surprises here both fixes together are held back by The vram Tweak getting very similar results to the vrm tweak alone this reaffirms that the issue is the bug I found earlier alright so it's time to go over something I've gotten a lot of questions about as a matter of fact it was one of the very first things brought up in the repo for the swap fix swappiness Hereafter referred to as swap tendency because YouTube hates things that sound like specific body parts so what is swap tendency well it's how eager the Linux kernel is to put the data into swap rather than RAM on a scale of 0 to 100 the higher the swap tendency the more often Linux will put data into swap by default Steam OS has a swap tendency of 100 that means that most data will go to the swap file rather than staying in Ram even if Ram is mostly vacant this is the case both with and without my swap fix and was the way that the OS was designed why does it matter reducing the frequency of placing data into swap means two things one that the main caveat of using swap is heavily mitigated if we only write to swap when the memory is completely exhausted it will heavily reduce the wear on your SSD with a 16 gigabyte swap file and a swap tendency of 1 you'll have less wear than the factory default of a one gigabyte swap file with a swap tendency of 100. two any situations where the swap fix could have hurt performance are now basically guaranteed to break even or maybe even offer a larger boost since the deck will use the fastest memory first at all times there isn't a performance penalty unless memory is really needed how do you set this mystical setting with the latest and greatest version of my swap fix script available now in my swapper Sizer repo to get the latest version simply uninstall the old version and run the installer script again in the same way as before as a recap you just need to go to my repo at github.com cryobite33 steam Dash deck Dash swap Dash resizer the link is on screen and in the description below scroll down to the direct slash simple heading and then right click and save the link if you have an issue where the link doesn't bring up a save as box then restart either desktop mode or the deck itself I believe this is probably a KDE issue since it happens in different browsers but after doing this you shouldn't have a problem downloading the file after that go to your downloads folder and double-click the file a window should pop up asking you if you trust the author press yes if you trust me or go read the code in the repo if you don't if you have an issue where the file just opens k-write then add this file as a non-steam game and run it from Steam I think this is another KDE issue but have not been able to replicate it myself now we should be past any potential issues with KDE go to your desktop and click on the icon marked swap resizer you'll be asked to enter your password so the script can run system level commands to clarify it wants the password you set with the passwd command so make sure that it's set enter your password and you'll be asked if you consent with a disclaimer read it and either accept or deny here's where the script updates come in now you'll be asked if you want to resize the swap file if you haven't already done so you can do so now if you've already used my script and in the past you can press no and continue regardless of whether you resize the file or skip it the next prompt will ask you if you want to change the swap tendency I recommend that every person who has used my script updates for this step alone press yes and select a value in general lower is better with one being the best choice but you may want to experiment with different values so I left it up to you after you choose a value press OK and you're all set the window will disappear and you're ready to go since the last video I also updated a few other things the script now supports btrfs or better FS or butterfs depending on who you ask several errors were fixed and there shouldn't be any more crazy terminal output during execution I'm pretty sure that was a zenity bug and a really quick shout out to Frodo Sam for giving me most of the code used to do this I just had to rearrange it to fit in in general the latest version is more stable and better than ever before so please get it okay on to the results of the updated fix and here you can see why I made such a big deal about adjusting the swap tendency in addition to using the fix itself it completely negates the negative performance impact of using the swap fix alone in certain situations in short this is as close to download more RAM as you can get at least in 2022 and we're not done yet let's look at what happens to the high preset When comparing to the default we gain 18 on the 0.1 percent lows with this fix that translated directly to much smoother gameplay especially when whipping the camera around lastly for this section let's look at the overall memory usage as we can see the version with a swap tendency of one undercut even default gameplay to me that means that the deck was using the swap vial for its intended use to keep data close at hand that isn't immediately needed next I wanted to try a few of the advanced options in the settings XML at the location on screen things that aren't visible in the game menu these are transfer cues and async compute I enabled both of them and used the flag Dash CPU load rebalancing now on screen to use red Dead's optional CPU scheduler here we can see that the low preset took a two-frame hit across the board and that's consistent with what I experienced in game as for the high preset we ended up with a 24 bonus to 0.1 percent lows I looked into this 0.1 percent low on the high preset without these tweaks a bit more because I was curious about the discrepancy and it seems that the town was especially busy during this run there were three carts and two Riders on screen at the same time with that in mind I think the difference between the two high presets is lower than 24 on average but I wanted to make sure I was transparent with all of my findings obviously 0.1 percent lows are hard to notice by definition but it did feel like the gameplay was smoother especially around the water something interesting of note is that when using these tweaks the CPU Works a little bit harder and the GPU Works a little bit less you can see that the CPU load tends to be a little higher for the duration of the Run likely due to the new scheduler other than that there's not much to say about these tweaks they're not too difficult to implement but they only really benefit higher presets and only marginally next I tried pinning the GPU at 1600 megahertz using the deck overlay ignoring the same 0.1 percent lows on the high preset as the previous section we can see that the performance is lower across the board looking at the CPU utilization we can see why the performance is worse it's getting starred for voltage by the GPU unfortunately this means that panning won't be getting us any frames today okay so this next one is a little different I did two things first I cranked the fan to 100 using the Fantastic plug-in on decky second I used a custom game mode config file the game mode config did the following it disabled the igpu power threshold although I'm not sure if that applies to the steam deck it applied dangerous GPU optimizations and it set the AMD GPU performance level to high using this I was hoping we'd see a performance lift by giving the GPU a little Headroom did it work unfortunately no the lows are a mixed bag and the averages are within margin of error on top of that the fan was very loud and the gameplay felt basically the same so let's keep moving for our last series of tests I wanted to see what the best performance possible was Red Dead settings menu won't lower much past 720p so I lowered the resolution in the game's properties to 1024 by 640. last I put the settings to the lowest disabled screen space Ambience occlusion and set the in-game FSR to Performance note that if you do this and use the settings menu to press apply while in the lower resolution the game will grow larger than the screen and make it very hard to do anything else I had to apply the settings confirm and find my way to exit game without being able to see the whole screen then on the next game boot up the settings were applied and the resolution was back to what I set so what were the results 13 higher averages with the 97th percentile actually breaking 60 FPS the lows were entirely in the busiest part of strawberry one of the lowest frame rates the game can give you meanwhile while riding around in the wilderness even right outside strawberry where there's a lot of vegetation the FPS count is in the mid to high 50s routinely tapping 60 FPS in addition to playing like a dream and looking like a dream covered in petroleum jelly it literally halves the GPU power draw from a 7 watt average all the way down to 3.5 that means that this will be an ideal candidate for a battery saving preset as well moving on I didn't want this video to be triple the length so here are some other things I tried but didn't fit without making this video a short docu-series using DirectX 12 mode instead of Vulcan caused crashes on launch and or when changing the settings in game downgrading to an earlier version of proton both 6 and 7 caused difficult Rockstar launcher issues and then identical performance zram had identical performance the FSR 2.1.1 mod versus the in-game fsr2 had identical performance and looked very similar CPU pinning at two 2.5 3 and 3.5 gigahertz led to degraded to identical performance but never better GPU pinning at 800 11 1200 and 1400 megahertz gave me degraded to identical performance as well proton GE and experimental had identical performance and and I tried resolution scaling as well but that gave me identical performance I think that that might be a different bug with red dead unfortunately as you can see none of these had a positive effect all in all I ran the Benchmark 112 times nearly doubling the benchmarking time of Alden ring that leads us to what options I think are best I've made four presets this time as usual choose which preset you'd like based on the type of player that you are and as a quick note All Battery testing was done at 75 percent brightness the first preset is the battery saver preset that I just hinted at a minute ago it doesn't look half bad on the deck screen and will net you the best battery life possible at a rock solid 30fps even in Strawberry if you want to play on Planes Trains and Automobiles without running out of juice then use these options one gigabyte of vram swap fix with swap tendency set to one in-game use the lowest preset and set FSR to Performance in the game properties set the resolution to 1024 by 640 and in the deck overlay enable half rate shading cap your FPS at 30 and set a TDP limit of 6 Watts the total play time for this preset was 2 hours and 59 minutes next up is what I call the fast preset for those who want the smoothest gameplay possible most situations will give you a very respectable if not 60 frame rate in larger towns there can be dips into the 40s but this is the smoothest you can get on the deck as it currently stands if you prefer quantity of frames over quality then use these settings one gigabyte of vram and the swap mix with a swap tendency set to one in-game use the lowest preset and set FSR to Performance in the game properties use a resolution of 1024 by 640 and in the deck overlay either uncap the FPS or cap it at 60. the total play time for this preset is 2 hours and 12 minutes as usual my capture setup cannot currently record 40 Hertz so this footage is to show you what it looks like and not be an accurate portrayal of frame pacing this is what I consider to be the best balance of settings and therefore the recommended preset the FPS will be locked at 40 the vast majority of the time with strawberry and Saint Denis dropping to the mid to high 30s unfortunately we can't really lock it at 40 in those situations without either more vram which we can't have or horrible quality which we don't want but I think this strikes a really good balance to use the preset I recommend for the average player choose these settings one gigabyte of vram with a swap fix and a swap tendency set to one in-game set the texture quality to medium anastrophic filtering to two times lighting quality to medium Global illumination quality to low Shadow quality to medium far Shadow quality to low screen space Ambience occlusion to medium reflection quality to low mirror quality to low water quality to low volumetrics quality to medium particle quality to medium tessellation quality to low and TAA to medium in the deck overlay set the screen refresh rate to 40 Hertz and cap at 40 FPS this preset got me an hour and 57 minutes of total play time lastly we have the prettiest preset it plays like a console game at 30 FPS as a matter of fact this reminds me of a souped up PS4 pro version of red dead but without that awful checkerboard rendering the gameplay here is locked to 30 at almost all times I did see a single drop to 28 FPS in Saint Denis but riding from Strawberry to the Lakeside Camp was absolutely gorgeous and played like a dream I was even able to get four out of four headshots when I was intercepted by some Bandits despite playing through my crappy capture card and obs's preview window to Marvel and art the games we can play on the go choose these settings one gigabyte of vram the swap fix with a swap tendency set to one in game set the texture quality to ultra anistropic filtering to 8X lighting quality to high Global illumination quality to high Shadow quality to high far Shadow quality to medium screen space ambient seclusion to high reflection quality to medium mirror quality to medium water quality to medium volumetrics quality to high particle quality to high tessellation quality to medium and TAA to high in the deck overlay set the refresh rate to 60 hertz and cap it at 30 FPS this gave me a total play time of 1 hour and 49 minutes all right everyone I'm sorry for the longer video there was just so much to cover but I think that by the end we had some good results it's a shame that we couldn't have the performance from before the 3.3.2 patch without crashing I honestly preferred needing to work around the crashes and have the higher frame rates in addition to that the vram bug is incredibly annoying so much of this game would have been helped by increasing the minimum vram to 4 gigs and being able to expand up to eight gigs hopefully in the near future valve will release another patch that'll allow us to hit those previous numbers regardless I'm incredibly happy with what I was able to squeeze out of the deck here and I'll almost certainly be playing on my recommended settings for the remainder of the game although if I want some nice screenshots I might swap over to prettiest with all that said don't forget to like the video in both real life and in YouTube's fiefdom subscribe to this very weird edition of Scholastic use the button to believe in yourself and whisper sweet nothings at your screen in the comments section below they will be heard as promised I'll be reading supers here from now on so a gigantic thank you to have Jenny Kelso and sakur Z for your support I'm sorry if I butchered your names it really really helps to get these videos out and I hope to be able to upgrade my equipment soon thanks to your generosity as mentioned previously in this video any patreon supporters will get a spot here at the end of the video in the future so if you feel like supporting me financially then I'd really appreciate it editing Kyle here again while I was editing this video I got my very first patreon supporter so a massive thank you to Vance Thompson for being my first ever supporter on patreon alright back to the video that's all from me this time everyone thank you all and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: CryoByte33

Views: 79,393

Keywords: steam deck, valve, testing, benchmark, swap, linux, fix, vram, performance, pinning, red dead redemption 2, red dead, zram

Id: epmYVEn97ac

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 29 2022