Red Dead Redemption 2

Starting from the lowest slider preset, I was able to isolate a couple of the biggest graphical annoyances to particular settings:

A) Shimmering appears on shadows and some textures.

Fix: Enable TAA medium or higher

B) Tree tops shift/displace

Fix: This appears to be caused by the D3D12 API. Switch to Vulkan API

C) Surfaces of water shimmer/distort

Fix: Set water quality to medium (refraction, reflection; and physics to level 2)

D) Soft shadows appear pixelated

Fix: Disable soft shadows or increase rendering resolution

D) Texture pop-in

Fix: Reduce memory requirements on your video card with lower settings. The VULKAN API seems to reserve 500mb of GPU VRAM to facilitate this.



The thing that pisses me off the most is that, if the VULKAN API wants to reserve 500mb (or whatever), couldn't NVIDIA save some face by allowing VULKAN to reserve the apparently useless half gig of VRAM sitting on the 970? Seems like a winner to me. But nah, that doesn't seem to be what's happening.
 


Just the phyiscs... NO... make the entire game reliant on FPS.

Not the most exciting video but certainly very revealing.

They certainly figured out how to down pace things from a design perspective.
 
thats what i'd guess as mine looks the same with medium settings.

I'll triple check tonight, because it's possible. I've tried adjusting the settings so many times, and with RDR2 resetting my settings sometimes who knows. It's absurd you need soft shadows on Ultra, or off, to fix that but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In regards to the aliasing, well... this game takes the cake, entire cake for having the worst aliasing I've seen if you don't have any TAA/MSAA etc turned on.

Out of curiosity, are any of you adjusting any of the NV control panel options. I never go in there, unless to make sure GSync is on, but now that I've checked out the 3D settings, it's weird because a lot of the global settings, and even game specific, if you've created a profile for RDR2, won't let you select "Let Application Decide", or doesn't even have that option.
 
The VULKAN API seems to reserve 500mb of GPU VRAM to facilitate this.
im getting that in both apis, my 4GB card shows as 3.495GB.

I'll triple check tonight, because it's possible. I've tried adjusting the settings so many times, and with RDR2 resetting my settings sometimes who knows. It's absurd you need soft shadows on Ultra, or off, to fix that but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In regards to the aliasing, well... this game takes the cake, entire cake for having the worst aliasing I've seen if you don't have any TAA/MSAA etc turned on.
yup and i agree. the taa looks like ass at medium
 
im getting that in both apis, my 4GB card shows as 3.495GB.


yup and i agree. the taa looks like ass at medium

Your 4GB GTX 970? In D3D12 my ram reports like 34xx MB and in Vulkan it reports 28xxMB... a 500MB difference. The 0.5gb in the card is not reported on top of the extra half gig reserved by Vulkan.

TAA does look pretty smudgey but it's 1000x better than seeing all the little alpha-jaggies with either FXAA on or TAA disabled. I don't believe there is any option for depth-of-field... perhaps it was meant that DoP effects would be "implemented" by the TAA? Thats what I feel like the "smudging" effect is accomplishing.
 
Your 4GB GTX 970? In D3D12 my ram reports like 34xx MB and in Vulkan it reports 28xxMB... a 500MB difference. The 0.5gb in the card is not reported on top of the extra half gig reserved by Vulkan.
look at my sig, where does it say gtx 970?!
 
Whoops. that's interesting that your Radeon card reports the same VRAM in both APIs and my Nvidia card does not. I wonder if this is unique to my GPU's architecture...
I'll check, but I'm sure it is like that for all hardware. The system reserves a certain amount of memory and maybe the game is actually reflecting that accurately by only showing you what is available for the game to use instead of giving you a false idea. If I remember correctly it shows 9.5GB for my 2080 Ti in Vulkan.
 
I'll check, but I'm sure it is like that for all hardware. The system reserves a certain amount of memory and maybe the game is actually reflecting that accurately by only showing you what is available for the game to use instead of giving you a false idea. If I remember correctly it shows 9.5GB for my 2080 Ti in Vulkan.

An 11Gb model? So it would seem more available VRAM results in a larger portion of it being reserved .

Yes, and I do recall when I dropped the preset slider to the lowest setting, the VRAM usage was something like 17xx MB for me (GTX 970 4gb). Basically what I've seen (in GTAV too) is if you go in to the last "bar" of the graphics memory available, that's where I've started to observe texture pop-in. So it's not like you can max out what is available and be ok. Whatever the game is reserving, it isn't overhead.

Also I noticed, whenever the API changed, RDR2 took longer to load at startup. I think it specifically shows a loading bar on the first startup after an API switch. I would guess this is the game detecting the graphics hardware available. I've observed the 500mb VRAM usage from startup, so it's something reserved by the game application, not just the rendering engine.

One thing I definitely noticed is the D3D12 load times are way longer than Vulkan.
 
this might be worth experimenting

Messed around with this and have set it to 3.8, games looks MUCH more clear. I'm running Vulcan on my 1070 and don't use the nvidias geforce experience junk so had no way to use NV sharpening. In fact I think the game looks much better with this setting than when I tried DX12 and NV sharpening.
 
I'm getting the same error below. This only started happening to me the moment I thought I'd give Red Dead Online a try on Saturday. Since then, every single time I try to continue my Story save, that below message pops up for me during loading. I didn't see it (heard the ping) and got the whole "Not responding" message bit. It wasn't until I was tabbed out of the game during one attempt to see this in the background. If I knew trying to play Red Dead Online would consistently screw up my story save, I wouldn't have even bothered. :banghead:


View attachment 200412

Would be nice if I could actually run this game sometime instead of getting error's and having to re-configure my settings since RDR2 keeps turning things off or randomly changing my settings. After having too many graphic anomalies, texture issues, and the game breaking tessellation rendering issue, I swapped out my 5700 XT for a 2070. Well now the game is really fck'd up. I couldn't figure out why the game looked so meh with everything set to Ultra, no MSAA, and TAA on High, and then Nvidia Image Sharpening on. The ground textures looks like it was on low or medium. Nothing helped. Reboots, driver reinstall. I checked the settings.xml file and noticed all the settings int here were different from what the actually in game menu was set to. Ok, so I deleted that file, reset the settings to Ultra. Still looks big time crap. I turned off TAA next, and wow, the game looks like shit. You'd need 16x MSAA to fix the jaggies, I've never seen a game with that bad of jaggies. Ok, back to the menu to see what else I can change... oh look, RDR2 crashed... ERR_GFX_STATE... :banghead:

The game at least looked good on the 5700 XT but the tessellation was so fck'd up it made the game unplayable.

EDIT: To clarify, I actually can get into Red Dead Online consistently... it's just when trying to load Story, I get that error. I also tried deleting my Red Dead Online character, as well as loading Story save while I was in Red Dead Online. No go either way. I'm at a complete loss.
 
I'm getting the same error below. This only started happening to me the moment I thought I'd give Red Dead Online a try on Saturday. Since then, every single time I try to continue my Story save, that below message pops up for me during loading. I didn't see it (heard the ping) and got the whole "Not responding" message bit. It wasn't until I was tabbed out of the game during one attempt to see this in the background. If I knew trying to play Red Dead Online would consistently screw up my story save, I wouldn't have even bothered. :banghead:




EDIT: To clarify, I actually can get into Red Dead Online consistently... it's just when trying to load Story, I get that error. I also tried deleting my Red Dead Online character, as well as loading Story save while I was in Red Dead Online. No go either way. I'm at a complete loss.
since its a "graphics state" error, try deleting your settings.xml file
 
No clue what the patch today fixed, they haven't released a patch log.

I will say that the game doesn't have the weird FPS drop bug I was getting that required toggling graphics options to fix. I haven't noticed much else.
 
No clue what the patch today fixed, they haven't released a patch log.

I will say that the game doesn't have the weird FPS drop bug I was getting that required toggling graphics options to fix. I haven't noticed much else.

https://support.rockstargames.com/categories/115001624507

I guess they don't release patch notes for updates that aren't "Title Updates." But it's Tuesday so, new legendary bounty, some new clothing options, and new competition series.

Also a new Geforce Hotfix driver from Nvidia, that may be what resolved your issue.
 
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since its a "graphics state" error, try deleting your settings.xml file

Did you mean the system.xml file under settings? If so, I tried this earlier before the quick patch released today. It didn't do anything for me.

Really wanted to get through most of the weekend with this, but I'm at wits end with this. I'll probably uninstall and reinstall when I have the bandwidth for the 112gb. :(
 
Did you mean the system.xml file under settings? If so, I tried this earlier before the quick patch released today. It didn't do anything for me.

Really wanted to get through most of the weekend with this, but I'm at wits end with this. I'll probably uninstall and reinstall when I have the bandwidth for the 112gb. :(
yeah its under docs>my games>rockstar>rdr2 or something like that. tried verifying the files? i had that exact crash last night and it loaded fine after hitting retry. only difference i could tell was the first time i launched, when it errored, i hadnt closed my browser windows before it started loading. on the retry they were closed and it loaded fine. not sure if its an actual issue or not but try making sure nothing else that uses the gpu is active.

edit: mine is located here: \Documents\Rockstar Games\Red Dead Redemption 2\Settings
 
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The driver just fixes the stuttering issue with high FPS on lower threaded CPU's.
 
I wonder why all their patches reset the settings? I think I have spent more time in the menu than I have in the game...
 
After the recent patches, Vulkan is definitely the better API for my system. I was getting CTDs and intermittent hitching and occasional shadow flickering with DX12, but Vulkan is significantly more stable and buttery smooth with no noticeable graphical artifacts.

I'm playing in 4K at a 0.75 resolution scale with recommended settings from the Hardware Unboxed guide and the game looks and plays fantastic now.
 
I just tried the resolution scale @ .90 and went from 57 fps to 65 fps avg in the benchmark. It looked sorta blurry but fixed that with the nvidia image sharping setting. in game is smooth, no issues. not bad for a 1060 i guess.
 
yeah its under docs>my games>rockstar>rdr2 or something like that. tried verifying the files? i had that exact crash last night and it loaded fine after hitting retry. only difference i could tell was the first time i launched, when it errored, i hadnt closed my browser windows before it started loading. on the retry they were closed and it loaded fine. not sure if its an actual issue or not but try making sure nothing else that uses the gpu is active.

edit: mine is located here: \Documents\Rockstar Games\Red Dead Redemption 2\Settings

Yeah, that's where I worked out of myself. I tried verifying the files twice, but I'm still getting that error. Works fine if I launch Red Dead Online, but anything with my Story save, it gives that dialog box during the loading screens. If I could figure out where my save file is locally (I'm halfway through the story, I think), I'll feel more comfortable doing a reinstall when I get bandwidth, but I've at least got a ticket open for the time being.

I suppose this at least gives me a chance to play the Warlord games released on GOG just earlier today.
 
I gave up trying to achieve anything smooth over 30fps, maybe the GTX 970 can handle it on medium settings at 1080p but the FX-8350 and 8 GB of RAM can't do it even on the lowest settings, not in Saint Denis. After watching the latest Digital Foundry video that examines the input latency between the X Box and PC, I think I'll be fine and won't be sacrificing anything... I'd rather be able to see what I'm shooting than shoot it quickly, because that's apparently close to impossible given the animation-driven mechanics of the game.
 
Are they working on improving FPS on PC, or is it staying the way it is? I doubt my 1060 6gb will be enough for 1080p. I don't need 140fps, but I don't want a stop motion game either.
 
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