Red Dead Redemption 2 PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

DX12 VS Vulkan – Why we used Vulkan  

We used Vulkan for the bulk of our Red Dead Redemption 2 testing. A single sentence can summarise the reason for this. Red Dead Redemption 2 ran worse and frequently crashed on our test systems. Tom Logan, OC3D’s Managing Director, couldn’t even get the game to boot under DirectX12 without a lot of tinkering. 

Below are some performance results using a PowerColor RX 5700 Red Devil video card, where we can clearly see that Red Dead Redemption 2’s DirectX 12 performance needs work. We saw similar results with Nvidia Geforce graphics cards, but we did not feel the need to retest every graphics card just to prove a point. 

Our theory is that Red Dead Redemption 2 was initially designed to run on DirectX 12, but that idea was shelved when Google’s Stadia platform was announced. Stadia works using the Vulkan API, making it logical for Rockstar to shift its focus to the API. When PC and Stadia both support the Vulkan API, why wouldn’t that API not become Rockstar’s development focus?