Sudden FPS drops/stuttering/lag after 40 hours of playing

[Merino666]

Hi all,
This is my first time posting here, so my apologies if this isn’t the right place. Around the holidays I installed Red Dead Redemption 2, and loving it! Played 40-50 hours without any problems, just a slight stutter in the first minute of each session in story mode. However, since last weekend I have noticed a continuous stutter/lag that I can’t seem to fix.

Prior to that I had no problems running the game at decent settings, but now it is practically unplayable due to the stuttering. I did not make any adjustments to the games settings before that, although Windows did do some updates, and shortly after the beginning of this lag I’ve also installed the new Nvidia thinking it would help (it didn’t). Does anybody have the same problem and/or a solution? I have a 1,5 year old Lenovo Ideapad L340-15IRH with 8gb RAM, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 and Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-9300HF CPU @ 2.40GHz, so yeah, not particularly high-end stuff, but it did run RDR2 quite smoothly until a few days ago.

Started checking the framerate since the stuttering began, and in nature it’s jumping between an abysmal 19 and a maximum of 28 fps, in towns it drops even further to barely 10fps.


Solutions I’ve tried, to no avail:
-Disabling background programs during playing
-Updating Nvidia Driver
-Changing Widows power plan to ultimate performance (caused my fan to mostly make a lot of noise and not much else)
-Changed Windows Default Graphics setting to Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling
-Increased pagefile settings
-Changing graphics settings in accordance with this Youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5p7SNCrFAQ&t=193s&ab_channel=GtxrunGames

Did all these solutions separately, no results unfortunately. Didn’t check the FPS before the lag began, but it must’ve been higher I guess?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

RDR2 will eat up every single bit of whatever System RAM you have at some point during gameplay after approx 1-2 hours of being loaded into the Story or Online game world.

8GB simply won't be enough.
Or at the very least, you may have to do a RAM-Flush while the game is running.

What helps also is manually set the PageFile to None, apply and reboot.
Then change the PageFile again and set it to 16384 for MIN & MAX to give you 16GB worth, then click SET, click OK on both windows and reboot to apply the change. Disable Hibernation via CMD (Run As Admin) by typing POWERCFG -H OFF which will free up around 6GB of Disk Space for you. Once you type the command in Command Prompt, press Enter key. Then reboot to apply.

Playing very long stretches of any game on a Laptop is simply not a good idea. As you are forcing the Laptop to run very hot for a long period of time without any breaks.

The easiest way to do a RAM flush is to have at least one SSD in the system, then use the Piriform Defraggler app. Select an SSD drive and click Optimize. This will do a "whole disk TRIM optimization" which will flush ALL of your RAM in the process.

It is OK to do this while a game is running, however if it is a game like GTAV or RDR2, what you want to do before flushing the RAM is open the Windows Resource Monitor, wait til you see RDR2.EXE at the top of the listing of stuff thats running; due to CPU load and RAM usage it should jump to the top of the list. Right click RDR2.EXE and click on Suspend Process.


For modern Intel or AMD Ryzen Desktops or Laptops; it is perfectly fine to just leave the Windows Power Options set to Balanced.

Along with your NVIDIA GPU Drivers; update ALL of your Drivers too.
Intel Chipset, Audio, LAN, WiFi, BT; etc.
Get the official drivers from the Laptop maker or Motherboard maker; never through Windows Updates Services.
Go ahead and do an SSD TRIM Optimize. When it is done, right click RDR2.EXE again in Resource Monitor and click on Resume. If you are in the middle of playing an Online game such as GTAV or RDR2, you will end up in a session by yourself due to suspending the process which cuts your connection to whatever public lobby you were in before. It will make or auto join a new lobby all on its own after a short amount of time of remaining within a game such as those two.

[Salty Biscuit]

I just started having the same issue last night. I'm about 99 hours in. I've got 2.6GHz 6‑core Intel Core i7, 32 GB RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB. Restarting the game didn't help, rebooting the system didn't help. Have you tried the suggestions above yet?

[Salty Biscuit]

This worked, at least so far. From a similar thread:

Originally posted by Barrelz:

I noticed a while back that this game screws up its display settings cache 'a lot'. Other games do this too, but this game does it all the time, especially when I tinker a bit with the graphics. I think it might be Vulkan that plays up to be honest. Just gets all junked up and things stay switched on or corrupt or something.

Try this.

Whilst the game is closed.

Go to address Documents\Rockstar Games\Red Dead Redemption 2\Settings

I typically just delete everything in here (entire settings folder), but you only need to delete the files beginning with sga really. (You can always save the files in another folder if you are worried.) This will wipe your graphics settings cache for the game and they will go back to default. [Don't worry it has no saved game data here.]

Then boot up game and change the settings how you want. Try not to mess around too much changing things back and forth otherwise it might get junked up again.

For me this cures any graphical problems I get, and this game has a lot of them. The worst offender is the pixel dancing shadows and flashing textures and Frame drops. This fixes that for me.

Might work for you.

[Merino666]

Thnx Bad Moths!
I have not tried your solution yet, because surprisingly, RDR2 works again (for now). Didn't think it would matter much, but I did a disk cleanup with CCleaner, deleted all my cookies and whatnot, as well as using Task Manager to delete any unnecessary programs running before starting RDR2 up. Didn't think it would make much difference, since I did the same like a month ago, and don't have a lot of startup programs going on. Tweaked a little bit of the graphics quality too. It does the trick for now, but in the near future indeed a good decision to go for a RAM upgrade!

@Salty Biscuit:
Thnx for the tip! Good to know that this solution also worked. :)

[GAMRKNIGHT352]

sheesh 8GB RAM you might wanna get an upgrade on that