Red Dead Redemption 2 Optimization [Part 1] Let's Greatly Improve PC Performance!

[Music] welcome back to hard run Bach stand back for my week off had a fantastic time on holiday up in New South Wales but as it turns out of what has been happening while I've been away most notably a disastrous launch for Red Dead Redemption - with all sorts of issues ranging from constant crashing people being unable to launch the game entirely and of course poor performance on high quality settings today I'm going to tackle some of that probably not going to be able to solve the crashing issues that's on Rockstar Games who by the way they did have 12 months to get this right pretty disgraceful that in all that time they didn't bother to do vigorous QA on a variety of PC configurations but hey wouldn't be the first time PC gamers have been asked to wait for a port that when it does arrive arise broken and in a pretty terrible state when I will be able to tackle though is performance this game looks absolutely incredible on ultra settings definitely one of the best looking games I've played on PC but performance leaves a lot to be desired even something as powerful as an NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2080 super struggles to deliver 40 to 50 FPS with everything maxed out except msaa at a mere 1440p which is well below the performance we've come to expect from this card at this resolution in other titles a lot of that is because rockstar has gone crazy with graphics settings for the PC version channels like digital foundry have already discovered that console versions such as the Xbox one X run the game at a mixture of settings that often includes the equivalent of low or even below low quality settings so when you push the PC version up much higher in some ways the game does improve substantially in other ways the improvements are extremely subtle yet cost a ton in terms of framerate as always with that optimization guides we'll be going through and finding the best balance of graphics quality and performance so you can enjoy Red Dead Redemption 2 on your hardware hopefully with frame rates are well above 30fps I've actually been able to recover a ton of performance he often boosting frame rates by 40 to 50 percent with very minimal quality loss which makes the game much more playable so stay tuned to see how I've been able to make that happen however this video will only be covering half of Red Dead Redemption twos graphics settings if you've played the game you'll have seen the massive amount of quality sayings the game to offer split into standard and advanced options vigorously and accurately testing all of these settings in individual benchmark runs is very tedious especially with the game that is you know prone to issues and crashes so to save this video from being an hour long and save me a bit of work for now I'll be covering the Advanced Options in a separate video later this week even without touching the Advanced Options I'll still be showing you how to achieve huge performance gains today and I wanted to get this video out sooner so you guys can enjoy smooth gameplay as early as possible I've nearly finished benchmarking for the Advanced Options and there'll be you know some more performance to be gained there as well so if you want to see part 2 leave a comment below expressing how you might want to see that sooner rather than later I also want to do a quick shout out here for our merch story if you like these sorts of videos and find them super useful consider grabbing who do you like this one or a mug or you know whatever else you might want from the hardware unboxed all links are in the description below buying merch is a great way to support the channel directly and get a cool item in the process so yeah thanks for your support alright so let's talk about the test setup same as always the before most results are an average of multiple runs using Nvidia and AMD GPUs from several price categories although to remove any cpu bottlenecks I am using my core I 999 hundred K test rig with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 memory most gamers will be playing a Red Dead Redemption 2 while GPU bottlenecked so even if you have something like a risin 5 2600 the performance numbers should be still representative of what you'll be getting most of the benchmark runs are from the final scene of the built in benchmark which is a short walk through of the saint-denis area one of the most intensive areas in the game with some white action mixed in it's highly repeatable which is what we like to see however it doesn't do a great job of capturing the performance differences at night or with heavy water such as near the rivers in the game so for a few benchmarks I have also taken some in-game runs the results you'll see are designed to be representative of average performance in the game rather than doing spot checks which may only show brief worst-case performance and let's be honest in a game like Red Dead Redemption 2 we're going to be pretty interested in boosting performance in every area of the game given how it currently runs the visual comparisons are taken with 90 X 2080 super at 1440p we don't always represent the exact area we test for performance mostly because the visual comparisons are in gaming performances from the benchmark most of the changes should be pretty visible but we still recommend watching this video at youtube's maximum 4k quality setting because the extra bitrate really does help for videos like this as we're only covering half the settings in today's video I'll quickly show our baseline settings this is with everything on Ultra including the Advanced Settings with some exceptions water physics quality is one notch below maximum this is from using the high water mode in the regular settings I've also set reflection MSAA to four times rather than eight times because mostly eight times is often placebo quality and I've got both fxaa and MSA a disabled entirely everything else is maxed out alright let's kick things off with a look at texture quality this setting has a surprisingly high impact on visual quality more than you normally see from turning down textures from ultra to high you can see right from the start of this benchmark run that the cash register and bookshelf have hugely lowered texture quality with high vs. ultra and only falls away further from their medium looks awful and low looks disgusting in fact it's pretty funny to see low textures paired with high quality trees and fur throughout the games pretty stark difference really these settings should be renamed to provide added clarity I think ultra should remain but hi really should be a low setting and low should become very low or something like that well you look at performance yeah you can gain between three and six percent from switching away from ultra but the visual downgrade is significant and widespread across the game I wouldn't bother changing this from ultra unless you are running into vram limitations in which case I'd recommend high I try to avoid medium or low as much as you possibly can anisotropic filtering is the same here as in other games it improves texture clarity when viewing items at odd angles and for distant objects in most situations there's a subtle difference between each of the five options but when you stop and look closely anything below four times anisotropic can deliver quite blurry and low resolution textures even when you set the texture quality setting to ultra four times is the minimum I'd want to use here but sixteen times is a slight step up and coyly that I feel is worth it when viewing performance again sixteen times becomes the obvious choice because of its improved visual quality compared to four times but only a marginal reduction to framerate if you're on an entry-level hardware you might consider the lower modes like two times which bring up to a 3% performance improvement but for most gamers 16 times should be set and forget for Red Dead as well as most other games lighting quality is the first really interesting setting in the daytime this setting doesn't have much of an impact on visuals or performance in fact I found it very difficult to spot any differences during the day and this is backed up by no performance difference in the daytime saint-denis benchmark run I was using however lighting quality at night has a huge impact on visuals and performance lighting from point sources such as lamps illuminate other objects at a greater distance with Ultra and HI modes and you get more accurate lighting from the moon the lights also become dynamic on high and above mimicking the flickering of oil lamps whereas medium is a bit static in this scene in particular you can see that the light source behind the camera is able to reach and illuminate the back of your character with a high mode but not with medium the differences are even more pronounced when in the cities such as Saint Denis at nice with Ultra lighting quality illuminating many more surfaces scenes can be brighter and more filled out compared to on high or especially medium which have progressively darker looks but honestly even medium still looks fantastic in their scenes and to me anything higher looks decent but ultimately is a bonus on top of already excellent visuals and this is important because when you look at the performance there is a significant gain to be had from toning lighting quality down to medium for night scenes in the early game camp area where I tested toning the setting from Ultra to medium sort of 40% improvement to frame rates yep that's right 40% this is often the difference between gaming at 35 fps and 50 fps it's a massive massive performance game even when there aren't many light sources on the screen in areas like say Denis the gains can be even higher especially moving from just ultra to high I sometimes saw 15 FPS gains from this single setting change alone at night in the biggest city in the game because there are so many light sources on the screen and again the game already looks great on medium in my opinion and it has no impact during the day with low providing no additional performance to me this is a no brainer if you're struggling with performance at night which I think most people will be moving ultra down to medium in this setting is the best choice to immediately resurrect performance global illumination on the other hand is a more subtle effect that I found quite to distinguish between ultra has slightly more accurate lighting than medium or low but honestly the difference is here and not something you'll notice in general gameplay especially between ultra and high given high delivers a two percent performance boost over ultra I think this is a safe bet for most people and with no advantage pushing this down to medium it's what I choose to use most gamers will be pretty familiar with how shadow quality settings work in Red Dead Redemption it affects the resolution of shadows so how many jagged shadow edges we see on withdraw distances in some situations and sampling mode it appears that ultra shows for static objects are sampled at a higher rate than with high although the difference can be pretty hard to notice aside from that we get the usual differences Ultra has the cleanest shadow edges high is a small but noticeable downgrade and then it really falls away with the medium and low mowers which have much less defined shadows that make it hard to distinguish the items that are casting the shadows this can have a big impact in forested areas where the shadows from branches onto other trees really adds to the atmosphere when looking at performance there's an easy choice to make it while Ultra does look better than high the differences aren't significant enough in my opinion to justify a 5 percent performance difference most people will be really happy with the quality of high shadows I feel so making a 5 percent higher frame rate than Ultra I feel is worth it far shadow quality is much more subtle than general shadow quality part of the reason red Dead's game world look so dense and incredible is that even distant objects have some sort of shadowing far shadow quality affects the density and accuracy and even the resolution of these shadows however in both the benchmark and in some of the more open game areas I saw basically no performance difference between the settings there's a slight advantage shifting from ultra to high for almost no visual quality difference so I think high is a good choice here screen space ambient occlusion or SSAO effects ambient shadowing between objects particularly in corners or other densely packed environments the differences between Reds 3 main modes are extremely subtle Ultra has slightly denser and more accurate lighting than medium but you'd be hard-pressed to spot a significant difference especially in motion what you really notice the change is turning SSAO off which is something I don't recommend for modern games as ssao adds so much depth and density to the game world inside the shop we've been looking at turning off ssao looks so flat and boring almost like game from five or ten years ago yeah when you look at performance you can gain five to six percent from disabling SSAO but the quality difference is huge so I wouldn't recommend it and if you're choosing between the SSAO modes given there is no performance differences between all of them I'd stick to ultra for this one reflection quality is one of the most performance intensive settings in the game and often it chugs along with that much of a visual upgrade on the highest settings yes having reflections cranked up to ultra delivers high quality high resolution reflections and often on surfaces like glass it will reflect objects behind you similar to ray tracing but you know without ray tracing but on other surfaces like puddles it's much harder to spot the changes while Ultra reflections are spectacular and very high quality they're quite hard to notice unless you stop and admire them in Windows when moving around high or medium reflections are a decent substitute and while low is still okay as far as these sorts of reflections are concerned they often make windows look a dirty or translucent as the reflection resolution is quite low when benchmarking the game reflection quality has a huge impact in saint-denis benchmark pass for example I saw a 15% performance improvement simply moving down from ultra to high and altered compared to medium is more like a 20 percent gain with diminishing returns with low yeah ultra reflections are a huge upgrade over the console version of the game which is lower than low setting but given how unlikely you are to actually notice the change in real gameplay switching down to medium and banking that large performance gain is a great idea mirror quality is like reflection quality but only for the various mirrors in the game such as when you buy a hotel room simpler resolution downgrade with each summing here there is a small performance downgrade in areas with mirrors like this but given these scenes tend not to be very intensive anyway I'd leave this sitting on ultros the lower modes quickly get quite pixelated and ugly another really intensive setting and red dead redemption too is water quality although naturally the impact is most severe when water is actually on screen this isn't like shadow quality where it has a universal performance impact the big change here is high vs. medium high water quality has a better surface emulation better reflections and better refractions ie it looks really good and very lifelike in some regards it is quite impressive but medium also looks decent and I'd prefer that too low which doesn't have the same level of wave quality as the higher modes reflections are lower also worse which can give the water a more muddy or translucent look similar to what happened with standard reflections the performance difference here is significant moving from high to medium sort of 50% performance gain in areas with lots of water like the river I was just showing ya high looks amazing and it's one of those settings that really shows off what a PC can do given the water doesn't look nearly that good on consoles but would I take somewhat better wave simulations and reflections or 50% more performance I think for this game I'm taking the performance here and given medium still looks great it's my go-to choice here what about volume metrics this is often the most performance intensive setting in modern games developers seem to love cranking up their volumetric fog resolutions but it doesn't have the same impact in Red Dead Redemption - yes it's performance intensive but with effects like lighting quality reflection quality and water quality it's not the worst in this game volume metrics affect the widespread use of fog in the game especially in the swampy areas where fog is heavily used to provide a speech of the swamp plans I don't know it looks quite impressive in those areas though it also impacts cloud density and quality not necessarily the numbers of clouds you get but the puffiness of the clouds in all areas the differences are very subtle fog is still dense and decent resolution even on medium or low clouds are a little more obvious I found Ultra has much more complicated clouds compared to low which is especially flat compared to the rest fog density is also slightly worse on low compared to medium but outside of that you'd be hard-pressed to spot any major changes with higher volumetric levels for performance yeah medium volume metrics quality is a good choice given it will deliver a 7% performance improvement pretty much across the board given how often value metric effects are utilized and almost recommend low here but it's less than a frame faster most of the time and it looks slightly worse so I figure medium is the perfect balance here there's no significant difference to particle quality performance and it requires a restart to change so I'd leave this on ultra tessellation quality mostly affects the quality of deformable areas of the terrain such as snow and mud I didn't spot much change elsewhere for terrain but if you're making Myrtle snow trails with your character or horse yeah the difference is here a pretty noticeable ultra has much better detail on these troughs with greater depth and their edges it really falls away with medium and especially low which looks flat and almost as if you didn't interact with the surface at all given there is such a small performance difference between each of these modes I'd stick with ultra for tessellation if you have a much older card that can't run tessellation efficiently maybe this is a setting you should consider toning down but given modern cards are good for this effect it's one I'd leave maxed out how about temporal anti-aliasing or taa this is the main form of anti-aliasing in the game and the one I'd expect most people will use especially given the punishing nature of msaa it does a good job of reducing jagged edges and cutting out shimmering character hair in particular is very shimmery with taa disabled and looks pretty awful that's eliminated with ta on there is a slight reduction to sharpness with tear and nabel's but it's not the worst I've seen and that can easily be corrected with modern sharpening filters available through both the AMD and NVIDIA control panels these days as for which taa mode you should use there's not much difference between high and medium both delivered the main benefits of taa like shimmering reduction and jagged edge reduction high is slightly better at reducing jaggies but it comes at a one to two percent performance cost over medium which is still pretty good so I'll use medium here with a bit of additional sharpening if you find it too blurry not quite sure why fxaa is also available in the game given it's much worse than taa it's blurrier and doesn't have the same ability to cut out shimmering it also has a performance impact compared to not using FX air whereas taa almost appears to be a lower cost so I'd avoid this feature and finally we come to MSA which is a bonus feature for PC gamers that are already running on max settings and have performance to burn there is no doubting the game looks phenomenal with high levels of MSA a particularly four times and eight times but let's be honest the performance it is huge with taa already reasonably decent I don't expect this feature is something that many will use enabling two times MSA a drove it around a 17 percent performance hit bumping up to four times we've got a 30% hit and then nearly 50% with eight times MSA a on reasonably high-end cards you'll get much larger visual improvements in my opinion bumping up reflections water shadows and lighting up to ultra then using any MSA option often for a similar performance hit so again I think this is the last case as I mentioned earlier this is where we'll be stopping for now with our Red Dead Redemption 2 optimization we'll be coming back and revisiting this with a look at the Advanced Settings in a later video hopefully to get more performance gains for now let's see where we're at with the regular settings there are lots of settings I would be turning down from ultra in the game to achieve much better performance with minimal impact of visuals as I said throughout the analysis many of the ultra quality modes here either placebo quality or subtle enough that you'll be hard-pressed to spot a difference in most situations yeah things like ultra reflections and high water look great they add to the realism of the game and look far better than what you can get with the console versions but they really push PC graphics cards to the limits and only offer diminishing returns over what the game already provides if you have a really powerful GPU and want to experience one of the most visually stunning games on PC with all the bonuses turned up for the ultimate experience sure keep everything on Ultra but for more performance conscious gamers struggling to hit 60fps or anyone that wants to prioritize frame rate for high refresh monitors there are lots of easy changes to be made they still preserve the beauty of the Red Dead Redemption 2 game worlds here is what I'd recommend starting from a maxed out configuration I dropped lighting to medium global illumination and both shadow quality modes are set to high reflections water quality and volume metrics all down to medium and for anti-aliasing I'd use medium ta with the other options set to OFF making these changes delivers a 40 to 50 percent performance improvement in the final scene of the built-in benchmark and at times in the game I've seen results that are higher than that this takes a game that runs at 50 FPS to 75 FPS for example which is a huge performance game it also allows Red Dead to run at almost always 60 FPS if previously on ultra settings you were down in the low 40s which is great news unless not forget that in this configuration I still have all the advanced settings cranked up to the maximum so in part 2 I suspect there will be further gains to be had with my optimized settings I wouldn't say the game delivers amazing performance but it's more in line with a modern visually stunning game and even with so many settings on medium it looks better than your average 2019 PC title Rockstar probably could have avoided cries of poor optimization had they named some of the options differently in many circumstances the ultra modes easily have become extreme or insane modes while medium could have been bumped up to high or ultra and if they had unlocked some of the below lower modes seen on consoles this potentially could have helped low respect gamers as well as it stands that with these tweaks I found it hard to spot significant visual differences in most areas of the game worlds while achieving around 40% more performance in the best-case scenarios I've seen my framerate drop from 45 FPS to 75 FPS which is more than a 60 percent gain and makes the game much more playable at night the gains can be even higher taking a 35 FPS experience above 60 FPS which is a revolutionary difference in terms of smoothness and responsiveness the differences are more obvious at night with that cut back to lighting quality but again red dead looks amazing with more modest settings the more pressing issue with the game is the stability and crashing problems which I encountered on a pretty regular basis while testing especially when entering some of the townships on the optimisation front yeah things could be a bit better and some name changes would have helped but I'm honestly not that upset with performance or visuals on a mixture of high and medium the game either delivers insane visual quality with poor performance on Ultra or excellent visuals with acceptable performance with some optimized settings it's definitely not a fall at 76 situation where the game both runs and looks like crap and it's better than Borderlands 3 as well which is one of those recent not very well optimised titles so I think calling the game poorly optimized is perhaps a bit unfair what it's not acceptable though is launching the game in a broken state and making PC gamers wait 12 months for the privilege for a company with the resources of Rockstar and with the revenue they'll generate through Red Dead online over the coming years I think it's not good enough and there's been lots of problematic game launches recently but this is one of the worst in years and I think it's time for everyone to lift their game in that regard that's it for this one subscribe to ensure you don't miss part 2 of our red dead redemption - optimization guide you can probably see why we've made this two parts as this video is already pretty long and there are still plenty of settings to go consider supporting us on patreon if you like what we do or grab some merch from our store links in the description time to get back to testing I'll catch you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 1,470,486

Keywords: hardware unboxed, red dead, rdr2 pc, rtx 2080 ti, red dead redemption 2, red dead redemption 2 pc, video games, red dead redemption, rdr 2, red dead redemption 2 pc gameplay, red dead redemption 2 benchmark, red dead redemption 2 gtx 1650, red dead redemption 2 gtx 1650 fps test, max settings, rockstar games, rdr2 pc gameplay, rdr2 pc max settings, optimization

Id: 385eG1IEZMU

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019