How to make RDR2 playable on an RTX2060 laptop

[Matthew Bloch]

I'm trying to help my son set up RDR2 on his PC and can't find any settings that don't make it drop to 10fps very very often. It just doesn't seem predictable and the gaming experience is ruined quite often. I've tried the absolute lowest preset graphics settings at 1920x1080 and it still drops to 10fps in the benchmarks - the combat benchmark particularly.

I can't get a full-screen resolution less than 1920x1080, which is really annoying - even in "full screen" mode at 1280x720, it shows half the desktop and doesn't lock the mouse in, otherwise we'd settle for a lower resolution.

The PC is an MSI laptop with an i7-10750H @ 2.6GHz, 32GB RAM, Windows 11 and an RTX 2060 which seem to exceed the recommended specs. I keep it up to date, more or less.

He's played through the newest God Of War at 1080p (I think) without any other settings tweaks.

Nvidia claim that the RTX 2060 is "ideal for 1920x1080 play" in RDR2 but ... how? I hope I'm missing something obvious. I'm going to update the Nvidia driver now just in case, but if you have any tips to make it work I'd love to hear them. Thanks in advance 🙏🏻

[Bad 💀 Motha]

That will all easy do 50-60 FPS @ 1080p; you just need to configure the PC and Game properly.

RDR2 does not like Win11 and Rockstar and Microsoft have fixed that twice already since Win11 came out. IDK why people keep moving to Win11 on devices that came with Win10. It doesn't make much sense when Win10 is supported until 2028

Best place to start is ensure next to nothing runs in the background if you are going to do gaming. Sure you have have various startup items; but close all that stuff out before starting up a game. It will often just get in the way.

Wipe all the Drivers for Intel and NVIDIA; then reboot and go to their sites and get all the latest Drivers and install them, reboot once all that is done.

Intel > https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html

NVIDIA > https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/216929

Once done, set the NVIDIA as the default GPU in NVIDIA Control Panel.



Go to this folder and wipe the system.xml file so we can go back to default graphics settings easily for RDR2

* Documents > Rockstar Games > Red Dead Redemption 2 > Settings

Then load up Steam.
Then right click Rockstar Launcher from Desktop > Run As Admin.
Launch RDR2 from the Rockstar Launcher, not Steam.

Set game to:

1920x1080
Full Screen
VSync = Off
Textures = Ultra

Leave the rest alone for now. Apply Changes. Now try the Benchmark.
All you need to worry about in the benchmark is the Average. The lows and highs can be incorrect due to transitions during the different areas of the benchmark.

[Matthew Bloch]

Thank you, that sounds really useful.

I did watch the benchmarks, and there was definitely some dips to 10fps in the middle of the scenes, it wasn't just transitions.

Will your power tweaks and see what I can do.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Is the system using SSDs?
It might not be loading in-game stuff fast enough if RDR2 is on a HDD.

Play the actual game and see how it does.
The graphics settings can always be tweaked as you go.

[Matthew Bloch]

Well, one round of updating everything, disabling services etc. later...

Default settings (on Vulkan), 1920×1080, with vsync & triple-buffering off: average 23fps, peak 58fps but many dips to 10fps, especially in the combat part of the benchmark. (it reported the lowest was 6fps)

I repeated the bencmark, but using the highest-performing, lowest-quality preset: average 32fps, peak 78fps but it still dipped to 6fps in exactly the same places.

I tried again with DirectX and the "ultra" defaults. There were _fewer_ dips (24fps average, peak 60fps), but the combat scene at the end still chugged pretty badly, still down to 6fps. I think that would be difficult to play.

I don't know, I will just leave it on the lowest settings with DirectX but something about this particular laptop and its (pretty vanilla) software setup seem to make for sporadic poor performance.

I'll leave it with the boy to try out tomorrow but for whatever reason this just seems to be the limit on this computer.

I have a similar-era 2060-based laptop so I could try it on mine for comparison.

If I have the energy I could pull it back to Windows 10 but this feels like something more fundamental - memory performance or thermal throttling or something similar.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

In-game Disable VSync but leave Triple Buffering enabled.

In Nvidia CP set these...

VSync = Fast
Low Latency = On
Power = Prefer Max Performance
Shader Cache = 10GB minimum

[Matthew Bloch]

(and yup it's running off an NVMe drive).

[Matthew Bloch]

Thanks! Unfortunately those changes definitely made it worse. The chase & entire final combat section was <10fps, and the min / max / average came out at 6/50/18.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Then it's using your Intel GPU and not the NVIDIA as yoursi would only drop down to MAYBE 30 fps in very rough spots. Either that or you have a thermal throttle issue with cpu or gpu due to very high temperatures. Ensure cpu and/or gpu is not going above 90*C

Also need to set the OS Power Profile to high or ultra performance before launching games to ensure the CPU and GPU run full performance and that the Laptop runs off Wall Power not the Battery

[Agent]

MSAA to off and use TAA instead. Turn down water physics and lighting quality. For the rest, just watch this optimisation guide.

https://youtu.be/Hyzp4zRivis?si=l8mojFHEpBJC6pYU

[Matthew Bloch]

Wow, I would be impressed if that was the Intel 😁 But no I retried the test with the laptop not on a sofa, and it seemed to pass through the juddery bits without sudden drops (down to 25fps, but not what I'd seen before).

There are a couple of YouTube videos of folks trying the game on this very laptop with frame rates on show, and they both see 30-50fps. 60 does seem a bit hopeful.

So I will try running the benchmarks alongside some temperature graphs and see what happens, and also on my laptop. Will update later in the week, cheers!

[Matthew Bloch]

Aha, so watching graphcs in MSI Afterburner, while the graphics memory speed varies, it always drops to 300MHz when the frame rate is tanking. Can't see any other correlation but that one feels certain. The CPU is hovering at 90°C. I will see if I can improve things by propping it up, adding a cooling pad or redoing the thermal paste.

Thanks for talking me through; I guess the driver settings you suggested may have driven towards throttling sooner?

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Never sit a Laptop on something soft; the air intake will not work properly like that.
So yes most likely it all was too hot during the game and thats why you saw 10 FPS.

If I can get a range of 30-60 FPS at 1080p on a 4770K w/ GTX 970 with DX12 and Textures set to Ultra (one of our older still very good working PCs around here I like to test stuff on) ~ Your laptop shouldn't have problems doing that.

[Matthew Bloch]

Left my laptop to download the game last night - 16GB (but faster) RAM, faster AMD CPU, same 2060 GPU.

But I tried the same benchmark at the same resolution and got similar results: 56/21/6fps. Crucially, while watching the gun fight sequence, there were no sudden plunges. All the frame rate movements happened as the camera panned to areas of more detail. Which is what I'd expect I suppose.

So #1 priority is to stop it hitting a throttling threshold which is where the game gets ruined - so I will check out the boy's laptop for fans, thermal paste, and maybe buy a cooling mat.

I'm a bit puzzled how NVidia can claim the 2060 is sufficient for 60fps on this gam. Between my two laptops and a few Youtubers, it doesn't seem to hit that for long. Maybe it'd be fine on a separate card in an airy desktop case with lots of cooling, but seems like a far-off target on a laptop.

Thanks again everyone!

[AMD Ryzen 7 5200HX 2.9GHz]

If your having CPU thermal limit problems with this half baked Rockstar game:

Start>Control Panel>Small icon view>Windows power settings>Balanced power plan>Get into that power plan>Advanced settings>A panel will appear, find "processor power management" at bottom, Max CPU Speed: set to %65 or %75 apply and ok.

[Matthew Bloch]

Thanks, I will give that a go if the boy is still struggling.

Yeah, it really does seem half-baked and that's surprising for a game with a 9-figure budget; I figured I'd just done something wrong.

Last night I ran the game with the laptop propped up on the first thing I could find for better airflow, which was 4 × ½ walnut shells. When the boy moved the laptop from the living room, he dutifully propped it back up on the same walnuts. They really do improve the frame rate.