When the PC port of Red Dead 2 first came out, it was a steaming pile of muck. It ran like garbage and changing the graphics settings had no effect on performance. However, since then Rockstar has kicked into gear and significantly improved both the performance as well as the visual quality. The latest patch released today does just that. The texture rendering at the medium and high preset has been enhanced. Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC will now offer a richer texture detail without affecting performance or increasing the system resource consumption.
Red Dead Redemption 2 PC Performance Optimization Guide: Most and Least Intensive Graphics Settings
Furthermore, the range of TAA sharpening has also been increased. This will make textures look sharper when TAA is enabled, all the while reducing shimmering and aliasing. Several other issues have also been fixed. The entire change-log is as follows:
- Improved texture rendering at the Medium and High quality settings, so the game will now show a higher level of texture detail without impacting framerate or requiring more system resources
- Increased the maximum range of the TAA Sharpening graphics setting, allowing players to make the game appear less blurry and match the quality available with external driver solutions
- Fixed an issue that caused some system configurations to misreport the amount of free video memory available for the game to use
- Fixed caching issues that caused graphical issues and missing UI that occurred after upgrading a system’s graphics card
- Fixed a rendering issue with shimmering/flickering textures near campfires when Parallax Occlusion Mapping was set to Ultra quality
- Fixed a lighting issue that caused blocky shadow textures around the player that could occur on some systems while Parallax Occlusion Mapping was set to Ultra quality
- Fixed an issue that prevented cloud transition screens from displaying on death/respawn when the system is low on video memory
- Fixed an issue with occlusion checks that could occur when running with DirectX 12, which prevented progress on some Story Mode missions
- Fixed a lighting issue that caused graphical artifacts to appear around distant trees on some system configurations while MSAA was active
- Fixed a lighting issue that caused flickering snow particle effects on some system configurations with multiple graphics cards
- Fixed a water rendering issue that caused flickering when running with DirectX 12 and having the Water Reflection / Refraction Quality levels set to Low
- Fixed a water rendering issue that caused incorrect wave simulation on some system configurations using multiple graphics cards
- Fixed an issue with hardware auto-detection that caused some system configurations to incorrectly default to low quality graphical settings on first boot
- Fixed an issue that caused an incorrect “Minimum Hardware Requirements not met” error on launch with some older system configurations that did meet the required specification
- Fixed several crashes that may have occurred when launching the game on certain hardware configurations
- Fixed a crash that occurred during gameplay when running out of system memory, resulting in a ERR_GFX_STATE error
- Fixed several crashes that could occur when switching between graphics APIs and display modes on some system configurations
- Fixed a crash that could occur when significantly increasing graphics settings, causing the system to run out of video memory
- Fixed several crashes and performance issues when using Intel NUC systems or when using integrated graphics hardware
- Fixed several random crashes that occurred during gameplay in Story Mode and Red Dead Online
