Red Dead Redemption 2 PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Performance Scaling – Custom Low, Medium, High and Ultra performance

On Page 2, we detailed our optimised presets for Red Dead Redemption 2, and now we can see the results of our effort. To test graphics cards from both the Geforce and Radeon camps, we tested our Radeon RX 5700 Red Devil and Nvidia’s RTX 2060 Founders Edition. As GPUs with £300-350 price points, they close to the price/performance sweet spots of both GPU camps. 

For starters, we can see that our Radeon graphics card commands a significant lead over its Geforce counterpart. In our testing, the RX 5700 performs more similarly to Nvidia’s RTX 2060 Super than its little brother. Even so, these tests are to showcase how our optimised settings impact Red Dead Redemption 2’s performance.  

Our benchmarks come from section 4 of Red Dead Redemption’s benchmarking tool, which we found to be similar to most gameplay within the title. We also found it to be more reliable for comparison testing, due to its limited run-to-run variance. Weather and time of day are huge bugbears when testing open-world games like Red Dead Redemption 2. 

On pages 3 and 4, you can see how our custom presets impact Red Dead Redemption 2’s visuals, and judge for yourself whether or not these performance gains are worth it.