PC settings equivalent to Xbox One X: (Thanks Mr Alex Battaglia for the effort you put into tuning and testing the settings until they were as similar as possible) Texture Quality: Ultra Anisotropic Filtering: 4x Lighting Quality: Medium Global Illumination Quality: Medium/Low Shadow Quality: High Far Shadow Quality: Low/Lower Than Low SSAO: Medium Reflection Quality: Low/Lower Than Low Mirror Quality: High Water Quality: Custom Volumetrics Quality: Custom Particle Quality: Medium Tesselation Quality: High/Medium TAA: High/Medium FXAA: Off MSAA: Off Advanced Settings: Unlocked Graphics API: Vulkan Near Volumetric Resolution: Low/Lower Than Low Far Volumetric Resolution: Low/Lower Than Low Volumetric Lighting Quality: High/Medium Unlocked Volumetric Raymarch Resolution: Off Particle Lighting Quality: Medium Soft Shadows: High Grass Shadows: Medium/Low Long Shadows: Off Full Resolution SSAO: Off Water Refraction Quality: High Water Reflection Quality: Medium Water Physics Quality: 1/6 Resolution Scale: Off TAA Sharpening: Off Motion Blur: On Reflection MSAA: Off Geometry Level of Detail: 5/5 Grass Level of Detail: 2/10 Tree Quality: Low/Lower Than Low Parallax Occlusion Mapping Quality: High/Medium Decal Quality: Medium Fur Quality: Medium
Here are my Settings with a GTX 1080 at 1920x1080 On my last benchmark I had Min FPS 48.5802 Max FPS 145.431 Average FPS 79.3344 (Vsync off for benchmarking) Game Build is 1207.60 Nvidia Driver 441.20 which came out yesterday Texture Quality: Ultra Anisotropic Filtering: 16x Lighting Quality: Medium Global Illumination Quality: Medium Shadow Quality: High Far Shadow Quality: Low SSAO: Medium Reflection Quality: Low Mirror Quality: High Water Quality: Medium Volumetrics Quality: Custom Particle Quality: Medium Tesselation Quality: High TAA: High FXAA: Off MSAA: Off Advanced Settings: Unlocked Graphics API: Vulkan Near Volumetric Resolution: Low Far Volumetric Resolution: Low Volumetric Lighting Quality: High Unlocked Volumetric Raymarch Resolution: Off Particle Lighting Quality: Medium Soft Shadows: High Grass Shadows: Medium Long Shadows: Off Full Resolution SSAO: On Water Refraction Quality: High Water Reflection Quality: Medium Water Physics Quality: 2/4 Resolution Scale: Off TAA Sharpening: 20/20 Motion Blur: Off Reflection MSAA: Off Geometry Level of Detail: 5/5 Grass Level of Detail: 2/10 Tree Quality: Low Parallax Occlusion Mapping Quality: High Decal Quality: Ultra Fur Quality: High The main differences being Anisotropic Filtering as it doesn't affect performance, TAA sharpening set highest, Motion Blur off as I tend to always turn it off, Ultra decals as the bullet holes better match the textures, and Fur on High. I get little performance difference with the adjusted settings but I gained a bit over the Geforce Experience 'Optimal' settings.
Xbox One X does not use Ultra textures, console never use Ultra textures, usually the step below Ultra, sometimes lower. You can see comparisons of PC at Ultra vs the consoles and the textures look noticeably better on PC. The consoles just don't have enough Ram
Well, one way to look at it, most PC games have now created a whole industry of RUclips channels to test and explain them. Rockstar are supporting our economy.
Digital Foundry is an absolute godsend in the PC gaming community. So much detail giving to what each setting changes and the performance impact of it. Thank you for putting in so much work!
Agreed but it does leave me with a problem. I now feel like I should go through the video again, bit by bit, remove the Xbox stuff I don't need and note down each setting result so I can tweak my own. Not sure I have the time for that.
PC ports should just all have an "elite console" preset that puts everything on console settings. Since this is often a very good starting point to adjust your settings.
G force experience literally does this. Pretty sure AMD has something similar as well, RDR even has a preset slider with several options for each setting that says "focus on balance or focus on quality".
Or learn how the setting affects each other and know your hardware. I never use preset because they never account for resolution especially with ultrawides.
@@tr1llwill Geforce experience doesn't do it succesfully. Almost every time it gives me really weird results. It sets settings which are not demanding low or the opposite. Sometimes it even lowers the resolution when it's absolutely not necessary.
@@Sackboy612 Indeed, I watch quite a bit of game technology based videos on youtube because it really interests me. Alex is a step above the rest in my opinion, it helps that you can hear how happy it makes him talking about it too. Also he always does great visual examples which alot of channels f*ck up in my opinion
For PC gaming you need 3 channels: Digital Foundry for the settings and the tech in the games, Hardware Unboxed for the GPUs that should run the games and Gamer's Nexus for Hair Physics... no, not in the games, in their videos
@@sauldownbadman876 I have an XBox One X and a capable PC for gaming. I love both for what they are, the console for its convinience and simplicity and the PC for its universality and freedoms, modding and tinkering... yes, tinkering is part of the full PC experience. It's very satisfying when a PC you built yourself boots up properly for the first time. Every console gamer should watch PC tech videos. Due to the fact the architecture is very similiar since PS4/XBO launch and the evolutionary, modular and open nature of the platform you can see the future of your prefered console ecosystem next gen. If you want bitching around and start platform wars, I'm definitely the wrong person for. I'm in gaming for more than 30 years now and played on many platforms of a large variety of manufacturers that existed during that period.
yeah.. that thing where it won't allow you to use settings because you don't have enough VRAM is funny as hell. It's because of "to keep game stable"... lol, so I need to shutdown game everytime, edit config file and then run it again because higher settings actually runs better for me.
I guess if R* renamed the settings differently (low = high, ..., high = insane (marked in a at red) and made it more clear in the settingsmenu that some of those settings arent meant to be pushed to the limit with todays hardware (like Gears 5 did with some of its settings, like the Screenspace Reflections ones), the outcry wouldn't be there... Low and medium in RDR2 do not look like what we normally get from "low" and "medium" in other games. The naming makes it sound way worse than the good visual quality of those settings.
Yep. Rockstar might think they're being clever or cool or whatever, but they seem to forget that people already have notions of what these settings are supposed to be. Instead of redefining low, medium, and high, Rockstar would have been much better served just creating even higher options. And also by not screwing everyone over with a broken launcher.
I strongly disagree. Sticking to the usual "low" to "ultra" labels makes more sense than doing Crysis 2 style options that start at "High". The options are labeled relative to each other, not relative to what you'd find in other games.
Rockstar Launcher recently got a patch where finally I can play with the latest bios. I had to use an older version the whole time to make it work. Not anymore.
@@reapthewhirlwind6915 If you buy Red Dead Redemption 2 on any other platform, you're going to use Rockstar's launcher anyway. So why bother getting it somewhere else if I still need it?
@@MorriganJade GTA V for example: Steam still says i don't have it, I can mark it as "not interested, but that's a lie (And i want Steam to know i'm into these sort of games), I Can't easily compare my Rockstar Achievements with my Steam friends, unless i add every one of them in the Rockstar launcher and compare there. And lastly, Steam has superior control over uninstalling/redownloading games. And keeping a list of all your stuff. I Can add it as a non steam game, But that won't give me easy access to the community hubs, the store page, achievements etc. Steam just offers a lot more around the game, tied to the games and player profiles. I don't mind installing launchers though. But when i bought the 7-disc GTAV for PC, i was a bit disappointed that it didn't check the game off of my Steam wishlist. They could have easily done that but chose not to and that's just a shame :( Not the end of the world by a long shot though :)
Lighting Quality above Medium also increases CPU usage by a fair amount, it's very noticeable on quad cores even with HT/SMT and will likely drop your FPS well below 60 in some places. It was that one setting that I found to be the biggest culprit for CPU usage and big frame drops even with DLSS on
Why even play on PC at that point? 30fps with dips into the 20s is unacceptable. I don't know anyone who games on PC that would want to play at anything less than 60fps. 30 just looks so awful.
@@agusr32 and you increase these setting with native 4k on yours gtx 1060 ? and you get better graphic than xbox one x on native 4k ? or you have little better graphic setting on, but in 1080p ?? that's is not better than xbox one x. when one x have a additional mode to drop the resolution on 1080p im sure that all graphic setting will be set to high and ultra.
Alex, I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the time and effort you put into these videos. I know it must take a long time to do all these small tests. This video puts performance of this game into context and really helps us set expectations properly based on our rigs.
I'm really impressed how good this video is. Going through all of the settings had to consume so much time. Digital foundry is amazing in case of content's quality.
I just gave this a re-watch. I've been experimenting over the last few months with just going for 120-ish or locked 60 fpswith higher settings with 1440p instead of 4k. I'm really happy there's a video/channel such as this for me to refer to when I'm stumped on quality settings and gpu expense : performance. I love this channel so damn much! All of the presenters that work on this channel and the people who do the backend stuff are all amazing. You guys all bring something awesome to the table and I'm never disappointed it's one presenter vs another. Stay awesome Digital Foundry.
Had a different experience with Parallax Occlusion Mapping. Going from High to Ultra adds significantly more details to the ground in some scene, like additional pieces of grass and stones but cost around 5% performance in those instances. People struggling with reaching their target FPS should experiment with that setting.
Modern PC gamers forgotten what "Ultra" means in the setting. They quick to judge by saying "unoptimised" after overestimating their rig. There was a reason why the announcer in unreal tournament yells "Holy shit" when you set the option to ultra back in the day.
Excellent video Alex, congrats. I would uggest you to look at config files, async compute is disabled by default and can only be enable via config file, it makes vulkan performance much more fluid on AMD cards and turing.
Thanks for the tip, Marcelo. I learnt a lot more in Sapphire's video than on DF -- as a matter of fact, I had already explored all the options by myself, and yes it takes a few hours of experimentation.
Most likely because Nvidia gpu users would call fault if that option does not turn on... you don`5 like to piss of Nvidia owners... ;) Happy owner of 1070 and Yes I know... I don`t have real async... most people don`t know.
@@trentf4891 Yes, Let I be thank for that which makes my eyes strain and my head ache with its blurry nature to remove some jaggies. This game is clearly not meant to be played without TAA, whit TAA clearly not being maeant to be used at 1080P at normal monitor viewing distance. TAA on 1080P Also introduces some odd ghosting effects which is more prominent in the fog. Nah, TAA in this game is broken. Yet, not using it results in Trees shimmer and flicker while Hair and Fur have the same issues, I nfact, Fur seems to be completely broken without TAA. But I'd rather have jaggies and shimmer than having vaseline smeared over my screen. Given how TAA works, It undoubtedly looks better at higher resolutions, but at 1080P and lower ist absolute garbage. If there is one game that should use DLSS its RDR2.
@@MrHendrikje Did you get it fixed, setting TAA with a 1080P monitor makes the game blurry, using Nvidia's filter to sharpen it makes it look better but still would prefer a in game fix.
@@MrHendrikje TAA only produces ghosting on Unreal Engine 4, the rest of the engines works fine with TAA, and also the image quality is improved over FXAA, is not like MSAA but is not necesarely blurrier like FXAA, just a little bit, and the image quality and framerate is a lot better
@@trentf4891 i hope TAA dies, its killing of the details artists painstakingly puts in environments, look at games like forza horizon 4 they use MSAA not TAA, and it looks so crisp...
Digital Foundry are really overlooked, the fact that I can just see a video explaining a lot of settings that hit performance hard and how to optimize the game is pretty fucking great. Hopefully the demanding nature of Red Dead 2 makes more people decide to tweak around with settings in more games or to look out for certain settings (like volumetric settings as a start). DF has not disappointed here at all.
I have been hyped as hell for this video. RDR2 on PC is one of if not the best looking games ever made. I'm 20 hours in and still on chapter 2 and I am still speechless at how good it looks
It's really nice that the Xbox One X version keeps quality high up close while sacrificing it further in the distance. I mean really, who is studying grass Shadow off in the distance? Some of these settings you'll never even notice until someone points them out to you. My pc only has a 1070 gpu paired with an acer predator 1080p monitor. I think I'll just enjoy this on my 1X and Oled tv. This was an amazing video, thank you.
30 FPS? No thanks. I would rather run my 1070 with the equivalent of x1x settings, on my 27" gsync monitor at 2556x1440 at 50 fps. It's much smoother, more responsive, and the pixel density is probably the same. OLED would be nice though. :-)
I know it’s not as high performing as a high grade pc, but I love my Xboxonex. It’s simpler, and it’s easier to understand, while giving me great graphics. Your videos are great man, thanks for what you do
For anyone new to PC gaming and struggling to run a certain game, make sure you always put the overall graphics settings to minimum. You can slowly start to turn up settings as you want them, while maintaining control of what's affecting your performance. Work your way up.
@Galva Tron I also played the game when it first came out and I regret it dearly. The 30 fps experience combined the the poor controller input and latency made it feel like a slog to finish. I didn't have too much fun with it. Playing the game at native 4k 40-60fps with gsync and mouse and keyboard feels like warm butter, while also having an extra crisp image quality. Well worth the wait!
brilliant video. Literally all other comparisons of PC vs console are random low/medium/high presets vs console. This was the first time I'd found someone to compare them this way. Legitimately impressed with your insight and dedication
Are you using an nvidia card? If so stick with Vulkan ingame and press alt+z in game to get game filters on instead of using any reshade with dx12. You can further utilize sharpening on top of in game and basic tone features like gamma and color ect with no loss of performance unlike reshade at this point. Its a good tool to know about in general.
@@Zer01neBDTDev try reshade with dx12. You loose 10% in random areas with nothing turned on. With Gefore I ran the same bench and got the same results within a margin of it off. Personally I dont use it in titles that dx11 and stick to reshade since it has way more options, but for some reason dx12 and reshade are screwed up in this game.
I really LOVE this kind of analysis, they're truly enjoyable to watch. Terrific work taking all these comparison captures, it must have been really arduous to assemble all of that. Congratulations to the team ;)
I just wanted to say thank you for the effort as always! This video helped me a lot with optimizing the game for myself. I'd also like to recommend Hardware Unboxed's guide in addition to this to people trying to figure out the individual settings and their performance cost.
Brilliant video.. Ive it on XB1X and PC 2080TI. Despite XB1X being amazing I cannot express how much better it looks on the PC. It's simply breathtaking, the lighting especially. I run it on nearly ultra everything and its staggeringly beautiful. I often end up just looking and playing with the world and not doing the missions!
You guys have kicked it out of the park with this video. You see so many other RUclips channel try to give their two cents about the settings in this game. But no one has done it like you guys. Two thumbs up.
So the game isn't badly optimised.. it's just the console versions are running at low/medium. Honestly, though.. as long as people keep textures at high/ultra and have every setting around medium the game will still look fantastic.
Really a testament to how good an xbox one X is that DF has to work so hard to find the differences. MS really outdid themselves and hopefully they have carried that same mentality into designing the next xbox.
It seems you've tested every setting pretty extensively. Can we get a breakdown of each setting, with performance metrics as well as quality information? Some of that info is provided in this video, but it's mostly focused on matching console settings, and that really doesn't do much to help anyone who want to push their settings further.
Would be fascinating to see comparison on different GPUs to see what it takes to run the game on XboneX equivalent levels on 1080p and 1440p. Oh, brilliant video btw. :)
@@erfgthygreas1709 But also people don't seem to realise how low it's settings are. It's the same with other games. PC gamers just stress out when they see the words "medium" and "low". That's not an insult the the X though. The visual delta is pretty low these days. Gamers just have to turn down. PC used to be the land of high resolution, but now it seems it's the first thing to go. Search "red dead redemption 2 pc 2070 super" and the majority of the benchmarks are 1080p. Kinda ridiculous imo. I sold my 1080p monitor years ago and I only ever buy x70 level cards.
erfgthy greas . Unfortunately I think they were worried about the cost, power consumption, and model fragmentation where it might make it more difficult to port games from the base console and increasing development costs.
Absolutely baffles me that this video is so in depth and yet doesn’t even mention in passing the TAA issues that basically ruined this game at any resolution lower than 4K
Bought an ROG PG35V, a d a 3090 strix. I upscaled this game to 4k and my jaw has been constantly dropping throughout my in game experiences. This port truly is like a love letter to pc gaming.
Elyad G. There is nothing to patch, it runs great at console quality and a little above, the ultra settings seem mainly just insane because well they are
Love it! Love it! Love it! Absolutely GODsWork. Such detail work on explaining each and every settings on this enigma of a game. I'm blessed to have Digital Foundry to save the PC community from dooming. I always watch PC tests for every game on DF & was eagerly waiting for this. We want more of this content in the future too. "Furious on a PC game, DIGITAL FOUNDRY to the RESCUE...."!!!
this makes me incredibly curious about a stadia settings comparison, because in the very least, water physics on stadia is higher than "low" as with xbox one x.
This the most useful video I have ever watched lately. Seriously I calibrated the graphics settings based on the recommendations here and it works like magic. I wish this video was there when I began playing.
Firstly, fantastic breakdown, loved it. I'm a professional tech artist, and I implement these effects regularly, so here's my thoughts as it may help decipher some things: With texture quality, all the settings will do is sample a high MIP level. As these are 1/2 resolutions of the original, textures will appear to have 1/4 of the pixels (because you halve width AND height) - so it will much worse as you go down the scale. Your experience could be explained like so: Terrain is probably rendered at MIP 1 from standing-up distance (MIP 0 for close-in camera shots). Assuming MIP 0 is 2048^2, MIP 1 will be 1024^. When knocking down quality to High, we go to MIP 2, and we're therefore talking a 512^2 resolution, which will be blurry by anyone standards. But, looking at your explicit examples, I think they're actually increasing by _two_ MIPs on terrain, so instead of 1024^2, you're looking at 256^2. In relation to VRAM on texture quality and why dropping quality results in not much VRAM savings: A lot of RDR2 effects are done using buffers, such as mud and snow deformation, water physics, certain volumteric effects (non-procedurally-driven ones), wind, terrain height maps, and ALL the post-processing effects, and probably many more. As such, a huge chunk of VRAM is reserved for these effects, rather than all on physical textures. Quite often, these post effects aren't compressed as much as mesh textures as they're being used linearly and sometimes with high bit-depth (for example, custom depth passes can be using 16-bit). If you look at VRAM usage with all post effects on minimum, physics and deformation dropped, you'll find usage is much lower.
@@РулонОбоев-н9ъ You have two options: Decreasing the number of samples (but this will reduce the anti-aliasing effect overall) or, you can use a sharpening filter - You can try Nvidia/AMD's (they both have them), or Reshade. TAA (or "TXAA") samples over multiple frames, and samples the motion vectors to work out what edges to anti-alias and how to do so. All AA effects will cause some sort of blurriness (that's what they do).
Thank you again Alex, for taking a huge amount of time playing both versions to compare same assets in the same spots at same time of day! On top of that, the analysis is splendidly meticulous. In my eyes, you define the term Digital Foundry in an unparalleled fashion.
![[4K] Red Dead Redemption 2: The Digital Foundry Tech Analysis!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Dnzuh6I8gnM/mqdefault.jpg)
![[4K] Red Dead Redemption 2: The Digital Foundry Tech Analysis!](/img/tr.png)
PC settings equivalent to Xbox One X: (Thanks Mr Alex Battaglia for the effort you put into tuning and testing the settings until they were as similar as possible)
Texture Quality: Ultra
Anisotropic Filtering: 4x
Lighting Quality: Medium
Global Illumination Quality: Medium/Low
Shadow Quality: High
Far Shadow Quality: Low/Lower Than Low
SSAO: Medium
Reflection Quality: Low/Lower Than Low
Mirror Quality: High
Water Quality: Custom
Volumetrics Quality: Custom
Particle Quality: Medium
Tesselation Quality: High/Medium
TAA: High/Medium
FXAA: Off
MSAA: Off
Advanced Settings: Unlocked
Graphics API: Vulkan
Near Volumetric Resolution: Low/Lower Than Low
Far Volumetric Resolution: Low/Lower Than Low
Volumetric Lighting Quality: High/Medium
Unlocked Volumetric Raymarch Resolution: Off
Particle Lighting Quality: Medium
Soft Shadows: High
Grass Shadows: Medium/Low
Long Shadows: Off
Full Resolution SSAO: Off
Water Refraction Quality: High
Water Reflection Quality: Medium
Water Physics Quality: 1/6
Resolution Scale: Off
TAA Sharpening: Off
Motion Blur: On
Reflection MSAA: Off
Geometry Level of Detail: 5/5
Grass Level of Detail: 2/10
Tree Quality: Low/Lower Than Low
Parallax Occlusion Mapping Quality: High/Medium
Decal Quality: Medium
Fur Quality: Medium
tl:dr. been looking for this
Ty so much :)
Here are my Settings with a GTX 1080 at 1920x1080
On my last benchmark I had
Min FPS 48.5802
Max FPS 145.431
Average FPS 79.3344
(Vsync off for benchmarking)
Game Build is 1207.60
Nvidia Driver 441.20 which came out yesterday
Texture Quality: Ultra
Anisotropic Filtering: 16x
Lighting Quality: Medium
Global Illumination Quality: Medium
Shadow Quality: High
Far Shadow Quality: Low
SSAO: Medium
Reflection Quality: Low
Mirror Quality: High
Water Quality: Medium
Volumetrics Quality: Custom
Particle Quality: Medium
Tesselation Quality: High
TAA: High
FXAA: Off
MSAA: Off
Advanced Settings: Unlocked
Graphics API: Vulkan
Near Volumetric Resolution: Low
Far Volumetric Resolution: Low
Volumetric Lighting Quality: High
Unlocked Volumetric Raymarch Resolution: Off
Particle Lighting Quality: Medium
Soft Shadows: High
Grass Shadows: Medium
Long Shadows: Off
Full Resolution SSAO: On
Water Refraction Quality: High
Water Reflection Quality: Medium
Water Physics Quality: 2/4
Resolution Scale: Off
TAA Sharpening: 20/20
Motion Blur: Off
Reflection MSAA: Off
Geometry Level of Detail: 5/5
Grass Level of Detail: 2/10
Tree Quality: Low
Parallax Occlusion Mapping Quality: High
Decal Quality: Ultra
Fur Quality: High
The main differences being Anisotropic Filtering as it doesn't affect performance, TAA sharpening set highest, Motion Blur off as I tend to always turn it off, Ultra decals as the bullet holes better match the textures, and Fur on High. I get little performance difference with the adjusted settings but I gained a bit over the Geforce Experience 'Optimal' settings.
Xbox One X does not use Ultra textures, console never use Ultra textures, usually the step below Ultra, sometimes lower. You can see comparisons of PC at Ultra vs the consoles and the textures look noticeably better on PC. The consoles just don't have enough Ram
Exactly,now on mine 2080ti all setting maxed and 4k working finally nice,have a god one man:)
this video should be linked when you enter the graphics settings in the game
lmao
facts
@El diablo da Costa I mean in order to know which setting does what and how much of an effect it has on the visual presentation of the game.
yellow bat fantastic comment!
Well, one way to look at it, most PC games have now created a whole industry of RUclips channels to test and explain them. Rockstar are supporting our economy.
Digital Foundry is an absolute godsend in the PC gaming community. So much detail giving to what each setting changes and the performance impact of it. Thank you for putting in so much work!
Agreed but it does leave me with a problem. I now feel like I should go through the video again, bit by bit, remove the Xbox stuff I don't need and note down each setting result so I can tweak my own. Not sure I have the time for that.
I mean hey, I don't know your life, but if you are planning to play a 80 hour game adding 1 hour to mess with the settings seems ok to me.
@@TheOriginalMyth 80 plus 😂🤣
They're very good friends with Nvidia too.
They do cover console games as well
This is amazing, thank you so much for taking the time to go through every single setting :)
You gonna aply these settings on your future tests bro? Love your channel and your work!
@@alessandrolopes5980 We will see ;) Some cards can't get to these
@@SantiagoSantiago Like gtx 1050 ti
@@gulagforge1954 nope
its his job. he gets paid money to play around with video games. lol
You had me at: "resolution of rendering for the various cascades used in the frustum aligned volumetric fog grid."
if lower, the air becomes more pixelated
very verbose
PC ports should just all have an "elite console" preset that puts everything on console settings. Since this is often a very good starting point to adjust your settings.
G force experience literally does this. Pretty sure AMD has something similar as well, RDR even has a preset slider with several options for each setting that says "focus on balance or focus on quality".
@@tr1llwill Too bad Geforce Experience is a piece of shit and prevents some games from saving their settings so I deleted it.
Or learn how the setting affects each other and know your hardware. I never use preset because they never account for resolution especially with ultrawides.
Problem is, the console settings have some customized settings that the pc settings cannot copy.
@@tr1llwill Geforce experience doesn't do it succesfully. Almost every time it gives me really weird results. It sets settings which are not demanding low or the opposite. Sometimes it even lowers the resolution when it's absolutely not necessary.
Noone does these indepth analysis videos like Alex does, dude is amazing.
That's why he does this full time for the channel and gets paid for it. Dude really is great.
I'd say Hardware Unboxed is pretty up there. But yeah, Alex is probably the best one.
@@Sackboy612 Indeed, I watch quite a bit of game technology based videos on youtube because it really interests me. Alex is a step above the rest in my opinion, it helps that you can hear how happy it makes him talking about it too.
Also he always does great visual examples which alot of channels f*ck up in my opinion
All of digital foundry are brilliant
@@Hard2hit94 I agree, love this channel.
Finally some sense in this wild west of a settings menu
The civilized land is destroying us, we are far east from the land we know, far from big open country.
For PC gaming you need 3 channels:
Digital Foundry for the settings and the tech in the games, Hardware Unboxed for the GPUs that should run the games and Gamer's Nexus for Hair Physics... no, not in the games, in their videos
Holy trinity of PC benchmarking and optimization analysis.
and then pc plebs wonder why people play consoles
No. Just Digital Foundry and Linus Tech Tips.
@@sauldownbadman876 I have an XBox One X and a capable PC for gaming. I love both for what they are, the console for its convinience and simplicity and the PC for its universality and freedoms, modding and tinkering... yes, tinkering is part of the full PC experience. It's very satisfying when a PC you built yourself boots up properly for the first time. Every console gamer should watch PC tech videos. Due to the fact the architecture is very similiar since PS4/XBO launch and the evolutionary, modular and open nature of the platform you can see the future of your prefered console ecosystem next gen. If you want bitching around and start platform wars, I'm definitely the wrong person for. I'm in gaming for more than 30 years now and played on many platforms of a large variety of manufacturers that existed during that period.
Also, Gamer's Nexus for their Senior AMD analyst.
I cannot imagine how painstaking this must have been to put together.
LowSpecGamer: "so into the ini files we go"
He already made a post about this, and he's not gonna make a video about it as the ini files are different this time around
@@littlegloom Luckily when some mods will come out, Alex (LowSpecGamer) will do a video! So, wait and hope
yeah.. that thing where it won't allow you to use settings because you don't have enough VRAM is funny as hell. It's because of "to keep game stable"... lol, so I need to shutdown game everytime, edit config file and then run it again because higher settings actually runs better for me.
@@Kamtar34 Luckily I didn't buy the game yet because I have a shitty PC. I thought that I'll buy it on Stadia, for avoiding all problems
Marco Gargiulo you're kidding right???
I guess if R* renamed the settings differently (low = high, ..., high = insane (marked in a at red) and made it more clear in the settingsmenu that some of those settings arent meant to be pushed to the limit with todays hardware (like Gears 5 did with some of its settings, like the Screenspace Reflections ones), the outcry wouldn't be there... Low and medium in RDR2 do not look like what we normally get from "low" and "medium" in other games. The naming makes it sound way worse than the good visual quality of those settings.
Yep. Rockstar might think they're being clever or cool or whatever, but they seem to forget that people already have notions of what these settings are supposed to be. Instead of redefining low, medium, and high, Rockstar would have been much better served just creating even higher options. And also by not screwing everyone over with a broken launcher.
Aye, seems the safest way to do it
gears 5 is easily maxed out atleast at 1440p so....?
I strongly disagree. Sticking to the usual "low" to "ultra" labels makes more sense than doing Crysis 2 style options that start at "High". The options are labeled relative to each other, not relative to what you'd find in other games.
LOW looks insanely bad in RDR 2 . Medium on the other hand looks very good and saves a lot of performance
"Rockstar Launcher has exited" is my favorite game of 2019.
Rockstar Launcher recently got a patch where finally I can play with the latest bios. I had to use an older version the whole time to make it work. Not anymore.
@@MorriganJade lol tf boycott rockstar launcher
particle quality to high , problem solved
@@reapthewhirlwind6915 If you buy Red Dead Redemption 2 on any other platform, you're going to use Rockstar's launcher anyway. So why bother getting it somewhere else if I still need it?
@@MorriganJade GTA V for example: Steam still says i don't have it, I can mark it as "not interested, but that's a lie (And i want Steam to know i'm into these sort of games), I Can't easily compare my Rockstar Achievements with my Steam friends, unless i add every one of them in the Rockstar launcher and compare there. And lastly, Steam has superior control over uninstalling/redownloading games. And keeping a list of all your stuff. I Can add it as a non steam game, But that won't give me easy access to the community hubs, the store page, achievements etc. Steam just offers a lot more around the game, tied to the games and player profiles. I don't mind installing launchers though. But when i bought the 7-disc GTAV for PC, i was a bit disappointed that it didn't check the game off of my Steam wishlist. They could have easily done that but chose not to and that's just a shame :( Not the end of the world by a long shot though :)
Lighting Quality above Medium also increases CPU usage by a fair amount, it's very noticeable on quad cores even with HT/SMT and will likely drop your FPS well below 60 in some places. It was that one setting that I found to be the biggest culprit for CPU usage and big frame drops even with DLSS on
Increase the resolution, you're more GPU bound than CPU bound at higher resolutions. I play at 4k so lighting quality for me is GPU bound.
When you spend more time watching videos about graphic settings, than actually playing the game =|
Yea RDR2 Setting is like a mini game than an actual setting
I am sure you would be playing the game for more than 30 hours.
@@hh-zm9gr I've been tweaking and playing with settings for more than 30hrs, and I just installed reshade with the rtgi shader
@@ezepoliyuvanilla is better.
@@ErwinPPP I agree
The amount of work put into this video is staggering. Great work as always.
This is the quality content I subscribed for
They should just put a "match xbox one x" setting in the game
ikr.
yeah, I would start increasing the settings from that option, to be sure it looks better than on console with my gtx 1060.
😁
Why even play on PC at that point? 30fps with dips into the 20s is unacceptable. I don't know anyone who games on PC that would want to play at anything less than 60fps. 30 just looks so awful.
@@agusr32 and you increase these setting with native 4k on yours gtx 1060 ? and you get better graphic than xbox one x on native 4k ? or you have little better graphic setting on, but in 1080p ?? that's is not better than xbox one x. when one x have a additional mode to drop the resolution on 1080p im sure that all graphic setting will be set to high and ultra.
Alex, I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the time and effort you put into these videos. I know it must take a long time to do all these small tests. This video puts performance of this game into context and really helps us set expectations properly based on our rigs.
Hear, hear!
its his job. he gets paid money to play around with video games. lol
Love your profile picture, see you have good music taste too!
I don't even own the game on any platform, but i watched the whole video
me too
"DDDR4" always gives me a chuckle :)
why?
feenomhoosh I don’t get it
@@qwertz7430 Many things in life will go right over your head, just accept it and move on...
2psah2 that’s a mindset the government would want you to believe. “don’t understand it?... don’t question it...”
9:17 That deer is me trying to make my way through life.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
LMFAO!!!!
I'm really impressed how good this video is. Going through all of the settings had to consume so much time. Digital foundry is amazing in case of content's quality.
"Yup, we're going through every single setting here"
Alex, you're the MVP! 🙏🏼
I just gave this a re-watch. I've been experimenting over the last few months with just going for 120-ish or locked 60 fpswith higher settings with 1440p instead of 4k. I'm really happy there's a video/channel such as this for me to refer to when I'm stumped on quality settings and gpu expense : performance. I love this channel so damn much! All of the presenters that work on this channel and the people who do the backend stuff are all amazing. You guys all bring something awesome to the table and I'm never disappointed it's one presenter vs another. Stay awesome Digital Foundry.
Just play native 4K with 100-150 FPS.
Alex you outdone yourself, you and John are the A team!
Had a different experience with Parallax Occlusion Mapping. Going from High to Ultra adds significantly more details to the ground in some scene, like additional pieces of grass and stones but cost around 5% performance in those instances. People struggling with reaching their target FPS should experiment with that setting.
25:37 Xbox One X Console Equivalent Settings
Incredible video. This going to help so many people.
For reflections, I acutally like the soft lower quality look.
Thank you for the in-deph analysis! Your PC videos never disappoint.
Definitely the best addition to the team.
Modern PC gamers forgotten what "Ultra" means in the setting. They quick to judge by saying "unoptimised" after overestimating their rig. There was a reason why the announcer in unreal tournament yells "Holy shit" when you set the option to ultra back in the day.
@Galva Tron where do they overhyping it?
Iaint paying shit for 2080ti to not play on ultra
@@user-qp8nx6iv6m just buy an 3080 for less price lol
Lol I loved hearing that “holy shit”. My epeen would grow 😆
My 2070 super can run at 4k maxed just fine.
Excellent video Alex, congrats.
I would uggest you to look at config files, async compute is disabled by default and can only be enable via config file, it makes vulkan performance much more fluid on AMD cards and turing.
Strange it's not in the graphics menu, anyway, any ideas of how much better it performs overall with it on?
@@paul1979uk2000/videos Yes, under vulkan it performs much better take a look at sapphire tech youtube channel, it almost flats the frametime line.
Oh dang, thanks for the tip! I'll def turn this on when I get the game
Thanks for the tip, Marcelo. I learnt a lot more in Sapphire's video than on DF -- as a matter of fact, I had already explored all the options by myself, and yes it takes a few hours of experimentation.
Most likely because Nvidia gpu users would call fault if that option does not turn on... you don`5 like to piss of Nvidia owners... ;)
Happy owner of 1070 and Yes I know... I don`t have real async... most people don`t know.
DF: *zooms in on blurry shot* See how that blurry shot is less blurry?
Me:
Be thankful for TAA, the alternative is extreme jaggies or msaa which would make the 2080 ti a 1080p card.
@@trentf4891 Yes, Let I be thank for that which makes my eyes strain and my head ache with its blurry nature to remove some jaggies. This game is clearly not meant to be played without TAA, whit TAA clearly not being maeant to be used at 1080P at normal monitor viewing distance.
TAA on 1080P Also introduces some odd ghosting effects which is more prominent in the fog. Nah, TAA in this game is broken. Yet, not using it results in Trees shimmer and flicker while Hair and Fur have the same issues, I nfact, Fur seems to be completely broken without TAA. But I'd rather have jaggies and shimmer than having vaseline smeared over my screen.
Given how TAA works, It undoubtedly looks better at higher resolutions, but at 1080P and lower ist absolute garbage. If there is one game that should use DLSS its RDR2.
@@MrHendrikje Did you get it fixed, setting TAA with a 1080P monitor makes the game blurry, using Nvidia's filter to sharpen it makes it look better but still would prefer a in game fix.
@@MrHendrikje TAA only produces ghosting on Unreal Engine 4, the rest of the engines works fine with TAA, and also the image quality is improved over FXAA, is not like MSAA but is not necesarely blurrier like FXAA, just a little bit, and the image quality and framerate is a lot better
@@trentf4891 i hope TAA dies, its killing of the details artists painstakingly puts in environments, look at games like forza horizon 4 they use MSAA not TAA, and it looks so crisp...
Digital Foundry are really overlooked, the fact that I can just see a video explaining a lot of settings that hit performance hard and how to optimize the game is pretty fucking great. Hopefully the demanding nature of Red Dead 2 makes more people decide to tweak around with settings in more games or to look out for certain settings (like volumetric settings as a start). DF has not disappointed here at all.
I have been hyped as hell for this video. RDR2 on PC is one of if not the best looking games ever made. I'm 20 hours in and still on chapter 2 and I am still speechless at how good it looks
Man, this is perfect. I can only imagine how much work has been put into this video. Thanks for this.
Colossal efforts went into this video. Well done!
25:49 for the settings
It's really nice that the Xbox One X version keeps quality high up close while sacrificing it further in the distance. I mean really, who is studying grass Shadow off in the distance? Some of these settings you'll never even notice until someone points them out to you. My pc only has a 1070 gpu paired with an acer predator 1080p monitor. I think I'll just enjoy this on my 1X and Oled tv. This was an amazing video, thank you.
Agreed. Rockstar made the right choice in how they optimized the game.
rody2213 Xbox one X is punching well above it’s weight. I can only imagine if they had put a little bit better cpu like a Ryzen 1600
30 FPS? No thanks.
I would rather run my 1070 with the equivalent of x1x settings, on my 27" gsync monitor at 2556x1440 at 50 fps. It's much smoother, more responsive, and the pixel density is probably the same.
OLED would be nice though. :-)
@@thetranya3589 Asking too much for a $499 console, $350-300 if you buy it used...
@@ChrisAzure I'm not sure what your point is.
I know it’s not as high performing as a high grade pc, but I love my Xboxonex. It’s simpler, and it’s easier to understand, while giving me great graphics. Your videos are great man, thanks for what you do
easier to understand meaning ur a dumbass lmao
@@smokeinc9800 blame Rockstar for screwing up the Graphical Setting system.
Even Gears 5 does a much better job at handling their graphical settings
This game is so beautiful
Luc Wijngaard Best looking game at the moment
@@bingobongo1615 metro Exodus
@Simulation World 2020 I have a 1080ti and play rd2 mostly on the one X and it's very hard for me to tell a difference.
Thank you for making this! I wondered why even the default settings were so demanding
Great job Alex! I admire your patience and devotion to the topic!!!
For anyone new to PC gaming and struggling to run a certain game, make sure you always put the overall graphics settings to minimum. You can slowly start to turn up settings as you want them, while maintaining control of what's affecting your performance. Work your way up.
@Galva Tron I also played the game when it first came out and I regret it dearly. The 30 fps experience combined the the poor controller input and latency made it feel like a slog to finish. I didn't have too much fun with it. Playing the game at native 4k 40-60fps with gsync and mouse and keyboard feels like warm butter, while also having an extra crisp image quality. Well worth the wait!
Yes! The anticipation was killing me!
Appreciate this attention to detail and the effort it must have taken. Thanks for sharing.
9:17 that deer is doing the treadmill.
brilliant video. Literally all other comparisons of PC vs console are random low/medium/high presets vs console. This was the first time I'd found someone to compare them this way. Legitimately impressed with your insight and dedication
It took me five hours to optimise the graphics. This video is a godsend.
I remember comparing graphics between Sega Genesis and SNES which was simple.
Now we are at this level of comparison and I love it.
Thank you. I'm a new to pc gaming and this helped a lot.
Are you using an nvidia card? If so stick with Vulkan ingame and press alt+z in game to get game filters on instead of using any reshade with dx12. You can further utilize sharpening on top of in game and basic tone features like gamma and color ect with no loss of performance unlike reshade at this point. Its a good tool to know about in general.
@@dogsbark5750 alt+z if you use GeForce Experience that Tank your framerate
Poor guy. You've been ripped off.
@@Zer01neBDTDev try reshade with dx12. You loose 10% in random areas with nothing turned on. With Gefore I ran the same bench and got the same results within a margin of it off. Personally I dont use it in titles that dx11 and stick to reshade since it has way more options, but for some reason dx12 and reshade are screwed up in this game.
@@AJ-xv7oh haha gave me a good chuckle. This gen of consoles was so miserable. Next gen looks somewhat promising though
Can't thank you enough Alex!
Can't wait to get the game later in the month and use your settings!
From now on this is my go to channel
I really LOVE this kind of analysis, they're truly enjoyable to watch. Terrific work taking all these comparison captures, it must have been really arduous to assemble all of that. Congratulations to the team ;)
I just wanted to say thank you for the effort as always! This video helped me a lot with optimizing the game for myself. I'd also like to recommend Hardware Unboxed's guide in addition to this to people trying to figure out the individual settings and their performance cost.
Respect for your effort.
Brilliant video.. Ive it on XB1X and PC 2080TI. Despite XB1X being amazing I cannot express how much better it looks on the PC.
It's simply breathtaking, the lighting especially. I run it on nearly ultra everything and its staggeringly beautiful.
I often end up just looking and playing with the world and not doing the missions!
You guys have kicked it out of the park with this video. You see so many other RUclips channel try to give their two cents about the settings in this game. But no one has done it like you guys. Two thumbs up.
So the game isn't badly optimised.. it's just the console versions are running at low/medium.
Honestly, though.. as long as people keep textures at high/ultra and have every setting around medium the game will still look fantastic.
ikr i have a pc and a jailbreak ps3 and rdr 1 still looks amazing tbh
That was another incredibly well made video, the amount of effort you put into your videos really pays off !
I was waiting for this video
Are you guys gonna make an optimization guide for mid-range PCs?
Incredible work Alex, thank you.
So much work went into this video, simply amazing. Thank you so much! Among my favourite channels :)
Nice work Alex, you must have watched through so much footage! But now we have something to use as a blueprint for the settings in RDR2, thank you.
Fantastic work Alex!! Thank you very much for your wisdom! Gonna check this out right away in my PC! ;)
Thank you Alex, amazing work and i dont even wanna know how many hours you put in to this.
Really a testament to how good an xbox one X is that DF has to work so hard to find the differences. MS really outdid themselves and hopefully they have carried that same mentality into designing the next xbox.
OMG! How the hell it possible?! GREAT WORK, Alex, you are real breathtaking!!!
WOW. Great quality. Congrats DF!
Low texture settings around the campfire reminds me of how RD2 would look on Switch
My PC's an old potato so this info has no real practical value to me at all, and I still watch these videos because they're so well-presented.
It seems you've tested every setting pretty extensively. Can we get a breakdown of each setting, with performance metrics as well as quality information? Some of that info is provided in this video, but it's mostly focused on matching console settings, and that really doesn't do much to help anyone who want to push their settings further.
was waiting for this video..THANKYOU
Dude, big effort, respect
Great Video !
Would be fascinating to see comparison on different GPUs to see what it takes to run the game on XboneX equivalent levels on 1080p and 1440p.
Oh, brilliant video btw. :)
Xbox one X is punching well above it’s weight. I can only imagine if they had put a little bit better cpu like a Ryzen 1600
@@erfgthygreas1709 But also people don't seem to realise how low it's settings are. It's the same with other games. PC gamers just stress out when they see the words "medium" and "low". That's not an insult the the X though. The visual delta is pretty low these days. Gamers just have to turn down.
PC used to be the land of high resolution, but now it seems it's the first thing to go.
Search "red dead redemption 2 pc 2070 super" and the majority of the benchmarks are 1080p. Kinda ridiculous imo. I sold my 1080p monitor years ago and I only ever buy x70 level cards.
erfgthy greas . Unfortunately I think they were worried about the cost, power consumption, and model fragmentation where it might make it more difficult to port games from the base console and increasing development costs.
I'm watching this even though I'm fully aware that I'll set every option to max settings anyway
That's big brain
Absolutely baffles me that this video is so in depth and yet doesn’t even mention in passing the TAA issues that basically ruined this game at any resolution lower than 4K
The game looks extremely blurry and unpleasant to look at. I have been struggling with this since December 2019.
AMD FSR at 10% helps a bit at 1440p
DLSS is much better than TAA
So much effort put into this video!
Bought an ROG PG35V, a d a 3090 strix. I upscaled this game to 4k and my jaw has been constantly dropping throughout my in game experiences. This port truly is like a love letter to pc gaming.
So this game is the new benchmark from now on
The video we all have been waiting for now i can finally enjoy RDR2 with xbox one x settings at 60fps. Still hoping for a performance patch
Elyad G. There is nothing to patch, it runs great at console quality and a little above, the ultra settings seem mainly just insane because well they are
Love it! Love it! Love it! Absolutely GODsWork. Such detail work on explaining each and every settings on this enigma of a game. I'm blessed to have Digital Foundry to save the PC community from dooming. I always watch PC tests for every game on DF & was eagerly waiting for this. We want more of this content in the future too. "Furious on a PC game, DIGITAL FOUNDRY to the RESCUE...."!!!
Excellent vid man. That's was just the perfect level of granularity, love the detail you go into.
i've been waiting for this video since game launch! alex always got the best best graphical analysis
That is an amazing test. I would love to see more tests like this, especially when the new consoles are released.
this makes me incredibly curious about a stadia settings comparison, because in the very least, water physics on stadia is higher than "low" as with xbox one x.
Good detective work Turok!😉
This the most useful video I have ever watched lately. Seriously I calibrated the graphics settings based on the recommendations here and it works like magic. I wish this video was there when I began playing.
What a channel this is. Great work again alex!
Firstly, fantastic breakdown, loved it.
I'm a professional tech artist, and I implement these effects regularly, so here's my thoughts as it may help decipher some things:
With texture quality, all the settings will do is sample a high MIP level. As these are 1/2 resolutions of the original, textures will appear to have 1/4 of the pixels (because you halve width AND height) - so it will much worse as you go down the scale.
Your experience could be explained like so:
Terrain is probably rendered at MIP 1 from standing-up distance (MIP 0 for close-in camera shots). Assuming MIP 0 is 2048^2, MIP 1 will be 1024^. When knocking down quality to High, we go to MIP 2, and we're therefore talking a 512^2 resolution, which will be blurry by anyone standards.
But, looking at your explicit examples, I think they're actually increasing by _two_ MIPs on terrain, so instead of 1024^2, you're looking at 256^2.
In relation to VRAM on texture quality and why dropping quality results in not much VRAM savings:
A lot of RDR2 effects are done using buffers, such as mud and snow deformation, water physics, certain volumteric effects (non-procedurally-driven ones), wind, terrain height maps, and ALL the post-processing effects, and probably many more. As such, a huge chunk of VRAM is reserved for these effects, rather than all on physical textures. Quite often, these post effects aren't compressed as much as mesh textures as they're being used linearly and sometimes with high bit-depth (for example, custom depth passes can be using 16-bit).
If you look at VRAM usage with all post effects on minimum, physics and deformation dropped, you'll find usage is much lower.
Hi, what to do with blurry TAA? (exept upscaling)
@@РулонОбоев-н9ъ You have two options:
Decreasing the number of samples (but this will reduce the anti-aliasing effect overall)
or, you can use a sharpening filter - You can try Nvidia/AMD's (they both have them), or Reshade.
TAA (or "TXAA") samples over multiple frames, and samples the motion vectors to work out what edges to anti-alias and how to do so. All AA effects will cause some sort of blurriness (that's what they do).
@@jrmaty Thank you, where can I find samples setting to decrease?
Thank you again Alex, for taking a huge amount of time playing both versions to compare same assets in the same spots at same time of day! On top of that, the analysis is splendidly meticulous. In my eyes, you define the term Digital Foundry in an unparalleled fashion.
appreciate your effort. thanks for the vid!
Awesome video! Thank you, Alex!
Superb video. Thanks for the hard work!
Everybody gangsta until The guy who plays without texture quality walks in.
You should go back and do setting-by-setting analysises of older games like Kingdom Come Deliverance, Witcher 3, ect.
Digital Foundry doing God's work on this game. Great videos!
50 hours of gameplay and maybe 35 hours spent on trying to find 60 fps with 3070 TI. Thank you very much great video great job
amazing work alex !