Optimization Guide for GTX 1070 (1080p, 60 FPS, Quality+Performance)

[PostRockBuraz]

Here I will list my graphical setting and PC specs.
If you have a similar setup you should get 60 FPS in wild and 50 to 60 FPS in big cities.
Spent countless hours reading other guides and testing on my pc and this is most balanced mix of beauty and fps i got.
It'll drop to even 45 in bug fights in denis for a moment but wilds seem stable 60 and villages stay above 50 most of time.
Could prolly improve upon city fights fps with better cpu but with what i got im okay with city rampage being but choppy cuz this games rly nice looking and i spend lots of time in nature instead of cities.


PC Specs:
GPU: GTX 1070
CPU: i5 3570k oc'ed 4.2ghz
RAM & VRAM: 8GBs
Monitor: 1080p 144hz free-sync aoc monitor
Audio: M-Audio BX8 D3 Studio Reference Monitors(speakers)

Graphical Settings:

Screen Type: Fullscreen
V-Sync: Off (unless you get screen tearing)
Triple Buffering: Off

Texture Quality: Ultra (unless it's a really old PC)
Anisotropic Filtering: x16 (x8 if it's a really old PC)
Lighting Quality: high (medium if you lack fps at night)
Global Illumination Quality: high (medium if you want a frame or two more)
Shadow Quality: high
Far Shadow Quality: ultra (performance: high)
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion: high (performance: medium)
Reflection Quality: medium (performance: low)
Mirror Quality: high
Water Quality: Custom (see below)
Volumetrics Quality: Custom (see below)
Particle Quality: medium (high is also okay)
Tessellation Quality: high
TAA: high (medium might make scenery far away look less blurry maybe but high usually looks better)
FXAA: on (you can try without it but edges looks better with it on my rig)
MSAA: off (huge fps drops with it active)

Graphics API: Vulkan (more fps)
Near Volumetric Resolution: low
Far Volumetric Resolution: medium
Volumetric Lighting Quality: high (performance: medium)
Unlocked Volumetric Raymarch Resolution: off
Particle Lighting Quality: high (medium is also okay)
Soft Shadows: off (looks bad on my pc) or medium (if you don't see tiny dots at edges of shadows) (eats fps but makes edges of shadows nicer)
Grass Shadows: medium
Long Shadows: on
Full Resolution SSAO: on (off also looks good but doesn't give much fps)
Water Refraction Quality: medium (performance: low) (adjust acording to your fps when near water)
Water Reflection Quality: medium (performance: low) (quality: high) (adjust according to your fps when near water)
Water Physics Quality: half (performance: 1) (lower settings don't look too bad)
Resolution Scale: off
TAA Sharpening: best left at default (between 15% and 66%) (personal preference) (if taa medium set it higher) (if taa high set it lower,... maybe)
Motion Blur: off
Reflection MSAA: off (try on if reflections look weird) (better set it to off for smoother gameplay in big cities)
Geometry Level Of Detail: 3/5
Grass Level Of Detail: 5/10 (performance 4) (quality: 6)
Tree Quality: high
Parallax Occlusion Mapping Quality: medium (performance: low) (good to lower for more fps in cities)
Decal Quality: high (or ultra) (medium is also okay tho)
Fur Quality: high
Tree Tessellation: off

EDIT: MSAA, Reflections, Water, Volumetrics & Near Volumetric Resolution take up a lot of fps. Turn msaa off and the rest of these to low for a great performance boost. Dial up to medium for slightly better athmosphere if your pc can handle it.

If you still don't get 60 fps in wild or get below 45 fps in villages then lower far shadows, reflections, volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax occlusion mapping quality, grass level of detail, and far volumetric resolution by one.
Or just some of them by one untill you feel happy with performance.
If that also didn't help enough then lower shadows to medium, tta to medium, fxaa turn to off, turn down geometry and grass level of detail by one and switch ssao and/or volumetric lighting quality to low.
This will have more impact on beauty of the game but it will give a good fps boost.

[PostRockBuraz]

wanted to make this as a guide but I've no idea how to put an image for a guide so I'll just put it here as a post that will collect dust in depths of forum

[HiddenGemzGamer]

Hi there. This really helped me. Thank you for sharing!

[Tashnaladar]

nice guide :) love the pink floyd song reference in your name sir. i wish we were all here

[Wotz]

Thx it really helped me

[Salt]

hopefully OP doesnt mind, or maybe could even update his post with this.
All the settings were tested by HARDWARE UNBOXED.
I made a few adjustments myself and it works great for INTEL + NVIDIA setup( VULKAN trashed fps with gtx 1070)
Or maybe you do, but want a smotth experience @ 4K
With these settings i can run rdr2 with 62 avg fps, it pretty much never dips below 50.
on my old laptop, when im not at home -
i7 6700HQ?desktop cpu alternative would be like I7 3770.
16gb dual channel ddr4 2400mhz ram
gtx 1070m 8bg vram.


settings:
texture quality- ultra
AF- 16x
lighting quality- medium
global illumination - high
shadow quality - high
far shadow quality - high
ssao - ultra
reflections - medium
mirror quality - ultra
water - medium
volumetrics - medium
paticles - ultra
tesselation - ultra
TAA - medium
FXAA - on(this my own adjustment, will explain why)
MSAA - off

near volumetric - low
far volumetric - medium
volumetric lighting - high
unlocked volumetric raymarch resolution - on
particle lighting - medium
soft shadows - high
grass shadows - medium
long shadows - on
full resolution ssao - off
water refraction - medium
water reflection - high
water physics - half
TAA sharpening(dont use the in game one)
motion blur(personal preference)
reflection msaa- 2x
geometry level of detail - 3/5
grass level of detail - 4/10
tree quality - high
parallax occlusion mapping - ultra
decal quality - ultra
Fur quality - high

if you are running nvidia graphics card - DON NOT USE VULKAN, DX12 only.
+go to you nvidia control panel ->manage 3 settings->program settings, add RDR2
set image sharpening to 0.40 and film grain 0.17, this will remove jaggy antialiasing along edgdes of objects.
just make seure you enable fxaa in game, alongside with TAA.

[PostRockBuraz]

Originally posted by Tashnaladar:

nice guide :) love the pink floyd song reference in your name sir. i wish we were all here

Haha thanks :D my name and pfp r references to my two fav bands.
Name; lost soul in a fish bowl is obviously reference to pink floyd song Wish you were here cuz there are lyrics that go Just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year.
And the picture is album cover photo of grinderman 2 which is an album of an awesome band called Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (well grinderman 1 and 2 are under nick cave label as solo work sorta but most of band was involved in the process and they removed "& the bad seeds" for band title for those two albums mostly cuz they were pretty different from rest of discography I think)
Wanted to make name and/or pfp a reference to my fav music genre, post rock, but it's very underground so no one would get any band, album or song references except maybe a person or two if I straight up just copied the name of some band/album/song or just replaced/added/removed a letter or two; which is far lazier and less neat imo then this.

[PostRockBuraz]

Update. Okay so after an update few months ago it seems best to leave TAA on default % setting in my case.
Edit I forgot to mention: soft shadows dont looked dotted on ultra if your rig can handle it.

[PostRockBuraz]

Seems that after the updates this might not be as accurate anymore but only by a little. it's still a good plan for using on 1070 with 1080p with 60fps

[PostRockBuraz]

been a while and game got some updates so idk for sure how well this holds up. i ended up trying to fix blurriness with nvidia control panel aa but at 1080p whatever i did it did not make things all that better. well, at least not better enough to look like aa at higher res.
some folks said to try reshades but i havent gotten to that yet

[P.O.I.N.T MAN]

Mhm might need too check your settings i have my rig with Nvidia Geforce 1070Ti and I58600K games runs slow and laggy on 2K :}

[PostRockBuraz]

Originally posted by P.O.I.N.T MAN:

Mhm might need too check your settings i have my rig with Nvidia Geforce 1070Ti and I58600K games runs slow and laggy on 2K :}

2k? whats 2k? im playing at 1080p? is that called 1k or 2k? i used to get 60fps outside of towns and 50fps in big cities with these settings at 1080p. Did they ♥♥♥ up the optimization via updates?

[Michoal]

Thanks im using these settings

[Terrapin2190]

Originally posted by Salt:

texture quality- ultra
AF- 16x
lighting quality- medium
global illumination - high
shadow quality - high
far shadow quality - high
ssao - ultra
reflections - medium
mirror quality - ultra
water - medium
volumetrics - medium
paticles - ultra
tesselation - ultra
TAA - medium
FXAA - on(this my own adjustment, will explain why)
MSAA - off

near volumetric - low
far volumetric - medium
volumetric lighting - high
unlocked volumetric raymarch resolution - on
particle lighting - medium
soft shadows - high
grass shadows - medium
long shadows - on
full resolution ssao - off
water refraction - medium
water reflection - high
water physics - half
TAA sharpening(dont use the in game one)
motion blur(personal preference)
reflection msaa- 2x
geometry level of detail - 3/5
grass level of detail - 4/10
tree quality - high
parallax occlusion mapping - ultra
decal quality - ultra
Fur quality - high

just make seure you enable fxaa in game, alongside with TAA.

Just wanted to pop in and say thanks!! Although I use Vulkan instead (DX12 causes shimmering around the character, lack of face details, and other oddities on my end), these settings finally got me to 60FPS at 1080p.

Using an i7-4790, GTX 1080 FTW, and 2x8GB DDR3-1600 @ CL11 on an ASUS H97-PLUS mobo. Using a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB for game storage. Somehow this even brought the temps down on the aforementioned NVME SSD (which does not have a heatsink, and due to my motherboard is limited to 850MB/s). They were reaching up to around 65-70C, now they're back to a much less worrisome 50-55C, with my CPU and GPU temps maxing out around 60-65C as well. Mind you, I'm using a very old custom gaming case which has a spot for a side panel case fan directed at the GPU - but with my recent CPU cooler upgrade I can't utilize it. I only have a bottom front 120mm case fan and a 92mm exhaust fan lol. This also leaves me a little wiggle room for other settings since I have a 1080 and temps are nominal. But it looks and plays fantastic as is now!

And thanks to the OP for sharing graphics settings as well! I would have never gotten this game looking nice without overheating with all the settings involved.

[PostRockBuraz]

Originally posted by Terrapin2190:

Originally posted by Salt:

texture quality- ultra
AF- 16x
lighting quality- medium
global illumination - high
shadow quality - high
far shadow quality - high
ssao - ultra
reflections - medium
mirror quality - ultra
water - medium
volumetrics - medium
paticles - ultra
tesselation - ultra
TAA - medium
FXAA - on(this my own adjustment, will explain why)
MSAA - off

near volumetric - low
far volumetric - medium
volumetric lighting - high
unlocked volumetric raymarch resolution - on
particle lighting - medium
soft shadows - high
grass shadows - medium
long shadows - on
full resolution ssao - off
water refraction - medium
water reflection - high
water physics - half
TAA sharpening(dont use the in game one)
motion blur(personal preference)
reflection msaa- 2x
geometry level of detail - 3/5
grass level of detail - 4/10
tree quality - high
parallax occlusion mapping - ultra
decal quality - ultra
Fur quality - high

just make seure you enable fxaa in game, alongside with TAA.

Just wanted to pop in and say thanks!! Although I use Vulkan instead (DX12 causes shimmering around the character, lack of face details, and other oddities on my end), these settings finally got me to 60FPS at 1080p.

Using an i7-4790, GTX 1080 FTW, and 2x8GB DDR3-1600 @ CL11 on an ASUS H97-PLUS mobo. Using a Samsung 980 Pro 1TB for game storage. Somehow this even brought the temps down on the aforementioned NVME SSD (which does not have a heatsink, and due to my motherboard is limited to 850MB/s). They were reaching up to around 65-70C, now they're back to a much less worrisome 50-55C, with my CPU and GPU temps maxing out around 60-65C as well. Mind you, I'm using a very old custom gaming case which has a spot for a side panel case fan directed at the GPU - but with my recent CPU cooler upgrade I can't utilize it. I only have a bottom front 120mm case fan and a 92mm exhaust fan lol. This also leaves me a little wiggle room for other settings since I have a 1080 and temps are nominal. But it looks and plays fantastic as is now!

And thanks to the OP for sharing graphics settings as well! I would have never gotten this game looking nice without overheating with all the settings involved.

you're very welcome. i rly liked the game and wanted to play it at semi stable 6'fps witohut it lookin like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ so i spent weeks watching every gudie, video and forum post about optimization and then i played with game settings for days on end.

Finally this seemed like best compromise. Managed to get 60fps in nature and game looking good (apart from some aa blurriness on certain things at certain distances)
altho in town it often dropped by 2-13 frames every few seconds but was sitll above 50fps most of time so it wasn't too noticable.

I actually also got a gtx 1080 now instead of 1070. Altho it doesn't boost my frames too much since it's only slightly better card but mostly cuz my cpu is old so it bottlenecks somewhat sometimes.

I also had high af temps but later on i realised ive been playing for years with faulty fan. i immidietly got a new one and now temps never go above 70C on neither gpu or cpu whereas before i was reaching near 90C in some game.

Didn't play the game for ages but might jump back in. Hopefully I remember what happened in first few acts.

anyhow. you're quite welcome. I'm very glad it was of help.