Red Dead Redemption 2 - 1440p 60 fps V3 balanced visuals and performance (for GTX 1080 Ti and equivalents)
I have extensively tested the settings in Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1440p, and have measured the performance impacts of the settings in the menu besides Texture Quality (TQ) which I have set to Ultra, and Anisotropic Filtering. I did this all the way down to their lowest settings.
From my testing, I have created my own configuration for the game and have even combined what I have learned from Alex's findings of Red Dead Redemption 2 on the Xbox One X into it, I also believe that I have identified two major bottlenecks for performance, these relate to foliage and fire effects at campfires.
So far, I think these are the best settings I have found, as they they enable me to target 1440p 60 fps on my GTX 1080 Ti fairly well, but it can dip to the 50 fps range in the worst case scenarios, most notably in those situations where you may encounter the "bottlenecks" I will mention below, or even when executing Dead Eye with multiple targets as I have observed performance dips in those scenarios as well.
I think these settings could be beneficial for cards that deliver similar performance to my own, such as the RTX 2070 and RX 5700 XT based on benchmarks from Gamers Nexus, TechSpot (Hardware Unboxed) and Digital Foundry.
However, due to things such as architectural differences I'm curious to hear how these settings would perform on such GPUs, perhaps they would need to be dialled down, or they could headroom for further improvements.
I highly recommend backing up your own settings, or taking screenshots of them before using my own!
I have spent a lot of time examining the performance difference between the settings in the most demanding scenarios, and have wrestled the game for almost every frame I could after observing performance impacts from settings that could significantly compromise the performance. Based on my testing I have created an optimized configuration for this, which attempts to push the graphical settings as high as they go without signficant compromises to performance. It even has some settings that are higher than those found in the Xbox One X equivalent settings, while I have reduced others such as as the Grass Draw Distance, Geometry Draw Distance and Water Refraction in the pursuit of more performance.
I'm convinced that I have hit a wall in terms of performance, as I had found that reducing some settings would hardly improve the performance, if at all. This occurred to such an extent that I was able to raise the graphical settings with minimal to no easily measurable performance hit on my PC. My initial settings had a lot of headroom, and combining them with Alex's findings really helped me as I was able to improve the visuals, and dial back other settings such as Reflections which I think has relieved some of the GPU time for me to improve things elsewhere.
Performance bottlenecks and scalability issues
On the topic of the two major bottlenecks I mentioned, In some situations, no matter what setting I reduced (excluding Texture Quality and Anistrophic Filtering) I found that standing inside foliage would incur a significant hit to performance, staring at campfires would also do this as well. I worked my way up from the lowest settings and continued to raise them until the game would incur a notable performance hit. To my surprise, I even discovered that when standing inside foliage, increasing the Geometry Level of Detail setting to 4, from 0 could improve performance by around 4% I don't know why this is the case.
There was also another scenario where I was looking at a landscape sprawling with foliage, in this particular scene I obsered performance dips down to around 60-61 fps, I attempted to optimize my settings to improve my performance here, and even reduced them to the lowest they could go, in doing so the frame rate went up-to around 67 fps, which is around 10% more performance from reducing settings to the lowest available options in the menu such as: Shadow Quality, Far Shadow Quality, Volumetric Far and Near Resoultion, Soft Shadows, SSAO... It gets to a point where you're sacrificng everything to gain 10% more performance, which leads me to think that these settings are not what's limiting the performance in these scenarios, but something that we either can't change in the menu, or doesn't go low enough that is consuming GPU time.
Lastly, campfires. No matter what setting I changed, looking closely at them would incur a performance hit, down to around 54-55 fps. I've obsered this in Saint Denis, Rhodes and even my own campfire I set up near Cattail Pond. Even after reducing settings such as the shadow quality settings, volumetric effects, lighting and global Ilumination to their lowest possible in the menu I had barely scrapped my frame rate target of 60 fps, so I decided it wasn't worth it and raised them, as it seemed like I wasn't signficantly compromise the performance by doing so.
From these scenarios I encountered, I theorise that this game has scalability issues relating to fire effects and foliage. Perhaps a setting isn't exposed to the options menu, or the game is just in need of a patch to improve things in this area or a driver update.
From these situations, I chose to raise my graphical settings until there were notable performance impacts, I've tested many locations but I may have missed something because there are many variables at play in this game. Perhaps use my settings as a base to build upon, and reduce things or raise them from there if you desire.
One particular scenario of this figurative wall would be when a campfire was on screen, I had consistent dips to the 54-55 fps range in Saint Denis and what I think was a farm in Rhodes, even after reducing settings such as the shadow quality settings, volumetric effects, lighting and global Ilumination to their lowest in game settings I had barely scrapped my frame rate target of 60 fps, this is the wall I was talking about, it just refused to scale further until basically everything was at their lowest setting, at that point you've basically sacrificed everything to gain 5 frames per second (10% more performance), this is what lead me to increase the settings further as it seemed that I wasn't significantly compromising the performance, as something else was limiting it substantially more regardless of what I had these set to.
I've performed numerous stress tests in Saint Denis under a variety of different weather conditions and during the day and night time.
I performed these stress tests by riding through Saint Danis and causing absolute chaos. I have witnessed minimum frame rates in the 50 fps range during this, most notably when executing Dead Eye and targeting people.
V3 Settings
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, Vulkan
2560 x 1440, 144hz, Windowed: No, Vsync: No, Triple: Off
Textures: Ultra
Anisotropic: 16x
Lighting: Medium
Global Illumination: High
Shadows: High
Far Shadows: Medium
SSAO: Medium
Reflection: Low
Mirror: Ultra
Water: Custom
Volumetrics: Custom
Particles: Low
Tessellation: Ultra
FXAA: On, TAA: Medium, MSAA: 0
Near Volumetrics Quality: Medium
Far Volumetric Quality: Medium
Volumetric Lighting Quality: Medium
Unlocked Volumetric Raymarch Resolution: Off
Particle Lighting Quality: Ultra
Soft Shadows: Medium
Grass Shadows: Low
Long Shadows: On
Full resolution SSAO: Off
Water Refraction Quality: Medium
Water Reflection Quality: Medium
Water Physics Quality: 25%
Resolution scale: 100%
TAA Sharpen Intensity: 100%
Motion Blur: On
Reflection MSAA: Off
Geometry Level of Detail: 79%
Grass Level of Detail: 25%
Tree Quality: Low
Parallax Occlusion Mapping Quality: High
Decal Quality: Ultra
Fur Quality: Medium
Generated on 2019-11-12 6:55 with Forceflow's RDR2 settings parser (
https://bit.ly/2oZlIuy)
Some notes on my experiences and performance regarding settings
DX12 - The game crashed out the ass within an hour of play, fuck this. (At-least on my GTX 1080 Ti)
I chose to set Lighting to Medium instead of High as I have observed performance impacts of around 20% depending on the lighting conditions in the game, for example. In a particular scene at Saint Denis I observed a 13 fps drop, from 70 fps down to 57 fps, this is pretty heavy to say the least.
Reflection - I've set this to Low because this eats frames even when I see no reflections, it's also the closest Xbox One X equivalent setting.
Particle Quality - I've set this to Low, I haven't been able to properly test this setting but I have noticed notable frame rate hits when fire spreads on medium. Since this, I've set it to Low, but haven't been able to examine the performance hit of it as of yet.
Global Illumination is set to High instead of Ultra because I was able to measure a performance impact of around 1-2% at one point IIRC.
Shadow - In the scenes I tested, Shadow Quality had a minimal impact on performance when comparing Medium to High, so I chose to stick with High, however this may different depending on the GPU.
Far Shadow - I've noticed slight performance hits from setting it higher than this so i chose medium. Perhaps try lowering this and the Shadow Quality setting together if you want more performance.
Unlocked Volumetric Raymarch Resolution - I haven't observed a performance impact from enabling this besides the 144 fps of my mouse cursor on my desktop when the game inevitably crashes on Vulkan upon loading into story mode. Maybe it will work for you but the only thing I see is my desktop when I try to load into story mode.
Volumetric Effects - I've left these at Medium, so far this setting seems this appear to offer decent performance at Medium, if you encounter frame rate drops in fog or perhaps cloudy weather conditions try dropping them all to the lowest and working your way up.
Parallax Occlusion Mapping Quality - I was once able to observe a performance impact of around 1-2% IIRC but I have had a hard time measuring this since. I thought High was a decent trade off between performance and visuals.
Fur Quality - I've obsered up to 6% performance impacts, so I've left mine on medium.
Geometry Level of Detail - Draw distance, pretty significant visual impact. Performance impact is notable too but I would argue its worth it to some degree, try and have it on the first setting or whatever you're comfortable with, I have it at 9 (89%)
Grass Level of Detail - Notable performance impacts if you set this above 2/10
Water Physics - If you want to see a magic trick, set this to 5/5. Otherwise, leave it between 1-4. 1 for best performance while still maintaining most of the physics simulation.
Tessellation - I have been unable to measure a performance impact from this, perhaps be cautious of this on older GCN GPUs which have notably weaker Tessellation capabilities than more recent AMD GPUs.
Decal - I haven't been able to measure a performance impact from this.
Water Refraction and Reflection - Notable performance impacts from these settings, I would recommend leaving them at Medium, but if you have the headroom or don't mind a slight hit to frame rate try using the High refraction setting when looking at water.
I think Cattail Pond is a good location to test this, on the map its West of Valentine.
Tree Quality - I think the High setting is a decent compromise.
I'll try to get to upload a video of how my V3 settings perform when I can.
