Why has my performance dropped SO much?

[Crayondalorian]

I'm not even sure this is the best place for this question, and I'll be the first to say I'm no tech wizard, but I'll do my best to make this short and sweet.

This was the first game I bought about 4 years ago when I got my new PC.
I have an AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Eight-Core Processor 3.20 GHz
with 16gb RAM and an Evga Geforce GTX 1070
I know it's nothing too crazy or special, and a lot of people have a hard time believing me when I tell them this, but I used to run this game at 95% full ultra settings.
In fact, that's how I played and beat the entire game my first playthrough.
It was a breath-takingly beautiful, once in a lifetime gaming experience.

Some anal FPS-obsessed types might have noticed some drops here or there, but it was never enough to hinder my experience or ruin my immersion. In my eyes, to my standards, the game played perfectly the whole way through. After finishing the epilogue I decided to finally give Online a shot (as it was still in it's infancy at that point). It was a little laggy and choppy here and there but I blamed that on the internet, not the game. Anyway I got about 50 or 60 hours out of online content and hung up my cowboy hat for a few years.

Cut to 2022, I get a hankerin' for some hunting so I uninstall Hunter: Call of the Wild and boot up my old RDR2 save... To my horror and dismay, it runs like crap. I have all of my same settings, only now for example, if I turn around too fast, everything behind me takes about 10 seconds to render before shapes become recognizable. That's how bad it is.

Probably more like what you would expect playing RDR2 with full Ultra settings on a 1070 would be like. I understand my computer is becoming quickly outdated, but my question is... why was I able to do it before?? It can't be an optimization problem... I mean games don't develop in reverse... do they?

I understand the longer you play a game, the more missions you do, the more stuff you unlock/buy/discover, the performance is going to naturally drop off a bit as it has that much more to load up and keep track of.
I've also considered the fact that a huge part of the reason could be that my PC was virtually bare-bones at the time and RDR2 was one of only a small handful of games I had installed. So this thing was carrying a much lighter load back in those days.
Still... it just seems a bit strange how drastic the difference is.

TL:DR How come my game no run good no more?

any ideas or speculation from anyone?
I understand this place is overrun with people having technical issues and I don't mean to pile on more. I'm not even overly concerned with "fixing" it as I plan to upgrade soon.
I'm honestly just kinda curious how this sort of thing happens more than anything.
Did my game "wear out" like an old baseball mitt, or did my PC?

[Ayahuasca]

I have noticed since windows 10 gear seems to wear out faster to me ......I used to get 10 years + out of a rig nowadays something goes wrong somewhere or another.....I am not saying microsoft is pushing crap to wear out your gear faster cause that would just be a conspiracy theory right?

I mean why would a billion dollar corperation with their hands in every pot want to wear your system out

[XOLiD]

Would be best to do a clean uninstall with DDU and then reinstall up to date graphics drivers. Rdr2 has some weird issues with graphics cache

[Mattee]

I've noticed weird graphical errors and glitches that weren't there before either, including a hard shadow flicker in the distance, a consuming black void, and other little things like characters holding their guns while holding other items and it just looks wrong.

[DargonBlak]

I've been playing for 2 years - very close to the same performance, so not much has changed.

What resolution are you playing at ? New Monitor perhaps ?

Many folks only talk about video cards, memory, cpu, and even hard drive bandwidth, but you resolution matters too (Pixels per Frame).

i run a 1070Ti at 1440p and manage ~55 FPS average, but settings matter also (i just let GeForce Experience Optimization set a baseline and then tweak from there)

[Crayondalorian]

Originally posted by Ayahuasca:

I mean why would a billion dollar corperation with their hands in every pot want to wear your system out

Hey man, you better cut it with all that crazy tin foil hat talk. It's not like any tech companies have ever been accused of and proven to be doing that exact thing...

Originally posted by XOLiD:

Would be best to do a clean uninstall with DDU and then reinstall up to date graphics drivers. Rdr2 has some weird issues with graphics cache

good advice, will try it out. Also sucks I have to keep this cpu drain Rockstar launcher and all its processes open while I play it. I'm sure that's not helping.

Originally posted by DargonBlak:

I've been playing for 2 years - very close to the same performance, so not much has changed.

What resolution are you playing at ? New Monitor perhaps ?

Many folks only talk about video cards, memory, cpu, and even hard drive bandwidth, but you resolution matters too (Pixels per Frame).

i run a 1070Ti at 1440p and manage ~55 FPS average, but settings matter also (i just let GeForce Experience Optimization set a baseline and then tweak from there)

Same ol' monitor. 2560 x 1440 QHD.
I realize I should just let my GeForce optimization do it's thing but after playing with 9/10 settings to ultra it's hard to go back. Kinda spoiled I guess. Anyway that's why I'm upgrading. The only reasonable conclusion I can come to is that my hardware is getting old and bogged down with all the little ♥♥♥♥ I've installed on my PC. Even when I try to strip it all down to the chassis, RDR2 seems to be just barely more than it can handle.

[AMD Ryzen 7 5200HX 2.9GHz]

If you have slow speed of loading in game textures, switch to Vulkan, it seems DX12 does sharper image but slow loading.

[JuiceWSA]

Your Stuff - is way better than My Stuff - and I'm currently (not UN) happy - for now:

AMD-FX-8350 (got me smoked like a Ham):
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/AMD-Ryzen-7-2700-vs-AMD-FX-8350/3957vs1489

AMD-FX-570 (I can't even see your dust):
https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-1070-vs-AMD-RX-570/3609vs3924

I enjoy myself:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2801022175

Not sure what you need that you can't get out of it.
I got everything I need out of my crap.
For now.

[DargonBlak]

Originally posted by Crayondalorian:

The only reasonable conclusion I can come to is that my hardware is getting old and bogged down with all the little ♥♥♥♥ I've installed on my PC. Even when I try to strip it all down to the chassis, RDR2 seems to be just barely more than it can handle.

umm... modern electronics do not slow down with age - their failure is a cliff, not a slope.

so, i have to disagree with your "only reasonable conclusion".

the GeForce Experience optimization settings have changed over the past 2 years, but i don't pay attention to that - i simply re-optimize after any big patch and get on with life.

So, most likely, you are missing something in the settings.

It *could* be that ur hardware is rife with partial failures (memory/storage sectors, for example), but that would affect everything and could be easily identified using the proper diagnostics and tools

Unless ur running an old laptop... then throw that sh*t out now.

[ant_sh]

Upload a video that shows your graphics settings and symptoms.

Install latest cumulative update for your OS, DDU and manually install latest nVidia driver, install MSI Afterburner. Delete sga files in RDR2 settings folder, run benchmark several times, monitor CPU and GPU clocks, utilization and temperature in Afterburner OSD.

[Uryon]

You didn't talk about it ( or I missed it, kinda red half the post ) but are you using mods? I noticed that using scripthook used to be fine, but now with the latest updates installing scripthook makes my game microfreeze a lot, even without any mods actually installed - just the script - while without it it runs smoothly as it always had. I have very close specs to yours.

[Његош]

I see that you released the first picture in March.2020 when you played everything on Ultra, then the game was much less demanding. Now it is demanding abnormally especially on Ultra, much stronger graphics cards are struggling to push Red Dead 2 to 1080p Ultra so most use HUB options, the game is very big and will always drop fps ... my advice is to lower the settings and see what suits you best, that's the solution, so you can't read the textures because the graphics card is struggling ... The game is more demanding every day !!!

[Његош]

Not your pc simply the game is too demanding, it has become demanding and there are no additions to the classic Rockstar!