Graphics Settings Deep-Dive: Red Dead Redemption 2 PC (Parallax, Raymarch, & More)
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Date: 2020-05-06
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Comments and reviews: 10
Kai
Been troubleshooting all day, finally got it to play smoothly, here are some tips: (your mileage may vary) 1. The game has closed unexpectedly; would not launch: (for those of you who bought on Epic) Update everything, Windows, Display Drivers, Rockstar Launcher, Game, everything. Clean-reinstall of any of them should help with certain issues, but I only clean reinstalled Drivers and Launcher because I don't want to sit here forever, and that worked for me. Go to documents - Rockstar Games - RDR2 and delete everything in that folder. You may want to back it up first) While some articles online may suggest otherwise, your game WILL NOT LAUNCH at all in Windows8 or administrator mode. It will either hang, or show you a different error message. You need to launch both Epic Store and Rockstar Launcher individually, have both of them logged in and ready, and then click launch from Epic's library. This is the only way. If you launch from Rockstar, Epic launcher will hang and need to be force-restarted. If you launch from Epic without having Rockstar Launcher open first, it will give you the game closed unexpectedly error. If you do everything correctly, the button in Rockstar Launcher will turn from Launch on Epic to Loading, and RDR2 will start. 2. Mouse cursor will not go away in gameplay: This is super annoying, and currently, the only workaround is enabling pointer trails in windows mouse settings (you can put it to shortest, then enabling vsync ingame. This will force you to play with vsync, so you have to choose between the lesser of two evils. This will also permanently disable the mouse cursor ingame, even in menus where you need it, so we gotta just deal with it for now (shrug) 3. Mouse stutter during slow movement: I initially thought this was due to frame drops, but after turning on the frametime graph and cross-referencing - no, it's purely due to the atrocious PC mouse support. To get rid of this stutter, you will need to go to ingame settings - control - mouse&keyboard and change mouse input from the default raw to direct input. This may introduce extra input lag, but it's better than random stutter, and this game already has so much input lag and input smoothing you couldn't turn off there's basically no difference anyways. 4. Weird looking ground textures like holes in the ground: You will know what I'm talking about when you see it. It's because the ultra option of Parallax Occlusion Mapping is currently bugged. Turn it to high, and you should be fine. This is one of the worst PC ports I've seen in years, but once you get past the annoyances, the amazing graphics are indeed worth the efforts. My Rig: 9900k, 2080TI, 64G Ram, Nvme SSD, still getting only 40 FPS at 4K(shrug) Even with all of the above, 3 random crashes in about 5 hours of playtime.
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Been troubleshooting all day, finally got it to play smoothly, here are some tips: (your mileage may vary) 1. The game has closed unexpectedly; would not launch: (for those of you who bought on Epic) Update everything, Windows, Display Drivers, Rockstar Launcher, Game, everything. Clean-reinstall of any of them should help with certain issues, but I only clean reinstalled Drivers and Launcher because I don't want to sit here forever, and that worked for me. Go to documents - Rockstar Games - RDR2 and delete everything in that folder. You may want to back it up first) While some articles online may suggest otherwise, your game WILL NOT LAUNCH at all in Windows8 or administrator mode. It will either hang, or show you a different error message. You need to launch both Epic Store and Rockstar Launcher individually, have both of them logged in and ready, and then click launch from Epic's library. This is the only way. If you launch from Rockstar, Epic launcher will hang and need to be force-restarted. If you launch from Epic without having Rockstar Launcher open first, it will give you the game closed unexpectedly error. If you do everything correctly, the button in Rockstar Launcher will turn from Launch on Epic to Loading, and RDR2 will start. 2. Mouse cursor will not go away in gameplay: This is super annoying, and currently, the only workaround is enabling pointer trails in windows mouse settings (you can put it to shortest, then enabling vsync ingame. This will force you to play with vsync, so you have to choose between the lesser of two evils. This will also permanently disable the mouse cursor ingame, even in menus where you need it, so we gotta just deal with it for now (shrug) 3. Mouse stutter during slow movement: I initially thought this was due to frame drops, but after turning on the frametime graph and cross-referencing - no, it's purely due to the atrocious PC mouse support. To get rid of this stutter, you will need to go to ingame settings - control - mouse&keyboard and change mouse input from the default raw to direct input. This may introduce extra input lag, but it's better than random stutter, and this game already has so much input lag and input smoothing you couldn't turn off there's basically no difference anyways. 4. Weird looking ground textures like holes in the ground: You will know what I'm talking about when you see it. It's because the ultra option of Parallax Occlusion Mapping is currently bugged. Turn it to high, and you should be fine. This is one of the worst PC ports I've seen in years, but once you get past the annoyances, the amazing graphics are indeed worth the efforts. My Rig: 9900k, 2080TI, 64G Ram, Nvme SSD, still getting only 40 FPS at 4K(shrug) Even with all of the above, 3 random crashes in about 5 hours of playtime.
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movax20h
POM was used in many other titles. One of the first ones was Crysis 2 in its 2011 update to DirectX 11. But there are many other games using it, Rise of The Tomb Raider, Battlefield, etc. It just isn't always exposed as a separate tweek in settings. I do however like ability to change quality of POM. It usually mostly affects number of iterations (subdivisions, thus accuracy, but making it slower) of raymarching used by POM. POM is actually a form of GPU raytracing restricted to one surface, and implicitly being curved. Tessellation is much more general and can do more things, and with less artifacts, but it is more complex and has more performance cost. You can do with tessellation everything you can do with POM, and do it even better, but for so small geometry (basically per-pixel triangles, it would be very costly to do so using tessellation. POM works very well 99% of the time, especially if scene and objects are properly designed, and usually pretty fast. So that is why it is used way more often than tessellation.
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POM was used in many other titles. One of the first ones was Crysis 2 in its 2011 update to DirectX 11. But there are many other games using it, Rise of The Tomb Raider, Battlefield, etc. It just isn't always exposed as a separate tweek in settings. I do however like ability to change quality of POM. It usually mostly affects number of iterations (subdivisions, thus accuracy, but making it slower) of raymarching used by POM. POM is actually a form of GPU raytracing restricted to one surface, and implicitly being curved. Tessellation is much more general and can do more things, and with less artifacts, but it is more complex and has more performance cost. You can do with tessellation everything you can do with POM, and do it even better, but for so small geometry (basically per-pixel triangles, it would be very costly to do so using tessellation. POM works very well 99% of the time, especially if scene and objects are properly designed, and usually pretty fast. So that is why it is used way more often than tessellation.
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Tea
13: 10 but vulkan and dx12 both reduce draw calls on the CPU and make them more of a GPU task Incorrect, the amount of drawcalls isnt based on the API, but the assets themselves, so unless you manually reduce the amount of geometry indexed, you wont reduce drawcalls. DX12 and vulkan, as you correctly stated, reduces the massive overhead that previous API's had. They are also no longer restricted in sending that data to the GPU through a single thread of your CPU, with dx12 and vulkan, a developer can use as many threads as they are allowed to send all the data to the GPU if needed. Just look at the 3dmark API overhead benchmark to understand this. The more drawcalls rendered, the more of your CPU it uses up, while in dx11, you see a single CPU thread doing the brunt of the heavy lifting and the total amount of geometry is limited by your single core performance, while in DX12 and vulkan every core can be used so long as the GPU is strong enough to need it.
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13: 10 but vulkan and dx12 both reduce draw calls on the CPU and make them more of a GPU task Incorrect, the amount of drawcalls isnt based on the API, but the assets themselves, so unless you manually reduce the amount of geometry indexed, you wont reduce drawcalls. DX12 and vulkan, as you correctly stated, reduces the massive overhead that previous API's had. They are also no longer restricted in sending that data to the GPU through a single thread of your CPU, with dx12 and vulkan, a developer can use as many threads as they are allowed to send all the data to the GPU if needed. Just look at the 3dmark API overhead benchmark to understand this. The more drawcalls rendered, the more of your CPU it uses up, while in dx11, you see a single CPU thread doing the brunt of the heavy lifting and the total amount of geometry is limited by your single core performance, while in DX12 and vulkan every core can be used so long as the GPU is strong enough to need it.
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John
I was able to launch and play the game on day 1. I'm running a standard-clock i7-7700k, 32GB, a GTX1080, and on SSD. So far, I'm seeing between 45-75fps at 1440p set at the recommended quality settings (mid-to-high, for the most part) on Vulkan. Haven't tried it on Direct3D yet. No bugs so far, no noticeable stuttering, and it feels pretty much like it did on the X1X, though it actually seems like it looks a bit better (even at 1440p. I'd love to see the game more optimized, and I'd really like it if more PC players could enjoy the game. It sucks that the launch was so problematic. I'm just happy to have it play well on my main gaming PC. At this point, I don't see much reason to try it on the laptops (both i7, one with a 1070 and one with a 1060.
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I was able to launch and play the game on day 1. I'm running a standard-clock i7-7700k, 32GB, a GTX1080, and on SSD. So far, I'm seeing between 45-75fps at 1440p set at the recommended quality settings (mid-to-high, for the most part) on Vulkan. Haven't tried it on Direct3D yet. No bugs so far, no noticeable stuttering, and it feels pretty much like it did on the X1X, though it actually seems like it looks a bit better (even at 1440p. I'd love to see the game more optimized, and I'd really like it if more PC players could enjoy the game. It sucks that the launch was so problematic. I'm just happy to have it play well on my main gaming PC. At this point, I don't see much reason to try it on the laptops (both i7, one with a 1070 and one with a 1060.
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Wolf
I have one annoying problem with my graphic quality, My graphic is smooth pixelated around stuffs, bodys and hair. It looks pixelated and smooth transparent, when i move around. it looks like low res around the items but the graphic settings is set on High, even also i use Ultra Texture Quality, Anisotropic Filtering on x16. Do someone know how to fix that? It really looks like a shit when i move around. The graphic quality was nice before i changed qualit preset level to high/ultra, and now it looks like a shit. I tried to set default settings, but the problem is still there. Why: / I Tried to turn off TAA, Turn on MSAA, but it looks same
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I have one annoying problem with my graphic quality, My graphic is smooth pixelated around stuffs, bodys and hair. It looks pixelated and smooth transparent, when i move around. it looks like low res around the items but the graphic settings is set on High, even also i use Ultra Texture Quality, Anisotropic Filtering on x16. Do someone know how to fix that? It really looks like a shit when i move around. The graphic quality was nice before i changed qualit preset level to high/ultra, and now it looks like a shit. I tried to set default settings, but the problem is still there. Why: / I Tried to turn off TAA, Turn on MSAA, but it looks same
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Mack
Ok, my Launch FIX cleaned of old AMD driver gunk from when I had AMD gfx from about 2 years back! (now Nvidia) and this worked for me also manually updated rockstar launcher. no bios updating no messing with admin rights oh and the problem I was having was Launcher just kept crashing who would have guessed residual AMD gfx driver would crash a launcher. I should also point out Rockstar advised me to try this using the AMD uninstaller program from AMD no less and well as I said it worked for me, can't say it ll work for everyone but hey just putting it out there. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X X570 Aorus Master motherboard Nvidia Evga 1080ti 32gig ram
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Ok, my Launch FIX cleaned of old AMD driver gunk from when I had AMD gfx from about 2 years back! (now Nvidia) and this worked for me also manually updated rockstar launcher. no bios updating no messing with admin rights oh and the problem I was having was Launcher just kept crashing who would have guessed residual AMD gfx driver would crash a launcher. I should also point out Rockstar advised me to try this using the AMD uninstaller program from AMD no less and well as I said it worked for me, can't say it ll work for everyone but hey just putting it out there. AMD Ryzen 9 3900X X570 Aorus Master motherboard Nvidia Evga 1080ti 32gig ram
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Sire
Was really hoping PC version would actually have Fur on the horses. As ex horse owner. would been nice. but nope Thanks Rockstar for half ass port. Should stuck with one API, stick with Vulkan api and just optimizes. I except if this ever gets fixed, Mod community with fix a lot the issues with PC port. Along horse actually having fur lol (assume no fur for consoles to keep performance decent) Q: I wonder if RD2 is using older version of vulkan, instead of using one provide by AMD/Nvidia, which be far newer or more update. (Thus why your seeing Purple screen, which known happen on other games engines when using older version Vulkan api)
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Was really hoping PC version would actually have Fur on the horses. As ex horse owner. would been nice. but nope Thanks Rockstar for half ass port. Should stuck with one API, stick with Vulkan api and just optimizes. I except if this ever gets fixed, Mod community with fix a lot the issues with PC port. Along horse actually having fur lol (assume no fur for consoles to keep performance decent) Q: I wonder if RD2 is using older version of vulkan, instead of using one provide by AMD/Nvidia, which be far newer or more update. (Thus why your seeing Purple screen, which known happen on other games engines when using older version Vulkan api)
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Grimmy
Been playing RDR2 for 3days straight and haven't had any issues? Although it did crash ONCE about 30mins into a session with ALL Graphics Settings on Ultra while testing the DX12 option. After switching back to Vulcan though, ZERO issues. I do believe the problems they were having were all related to the Rockstar Games Launcher which (iirc) they updated 1-2days ago now? Tbh my biggest complain so far would be how janky the controls are? But it has been awhile since I've played any of the Rockstar titles so it could just be me needing to get used to their Third-Person control style again?
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Been playing RDR2 for 3days straight and haven't had any issues? Although it did crash ONCE about 30mins into a session with ALL Graphics Settings on Ultra while testing the DX12 option. After switching back to Vulcan though, ZERO issues. I do believe the problems they were having were all related to the Rockstar Games Launcher which (iirc) they updated 1-2days ago now? Tbh my biggest complain so far would be how janky the controls are? But it has been awhile since I've played any of the Rockstar titles so it could just be me needing to get used to their Third-Person control style again?
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Jeremy
I was able to launch the game just fine. Watched half of the opening cut seen because of frame skips and made it 1 minute into game play. Before water started glitching into the sky and crashed the game. I then reopened the game without issue to check settings to find the game defaulted to 768p on ultra settings. Reset the settings to 1080p with everything on low and ran a benchmark. My i5 8400, 8gb ram, and 1060 3gb achieved. 17 low, 75 high, and 45 fps average. Both in the benchmarks and in normal gameplay, CPU spikes cause the game to be unplayable whenever I'm in a town.
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I was able to launch the game just fine. Watched half of the opening cut seen because of frame skips and made it 1 minute into game play. Before water started glitching into the sky and crashed the game. I then reopened the game without issue to check settings to find the game defaulted to 768p on ultra settings. Reset the settings to 1080p with everything on low and ran a benchmark. My i5 8400, 8gb ram, and 1060 3gb achieved. 17 low, 75 high, and 45 fps average. Both in the benchmarks and in normal gameplay, CPU spikes cause the game to be unplayable whenever I'm in a town.
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Glenn
After the game exiting right at the start on the gunsmoke right after loading bar for the first day or two, they put out a launcher patch and game patch (2. 6GB) and I was able to run the game and get one crash. Further launcher patches but no game patches and I havent had a crash again. Running Ryzen 5 2600X, RX 580 8GB, 16GB 3200Mhz GSkill Trident Z and have almost everything at Ultra and just tweaked a couple of the slider bars down, like for water. Hope those still having issues will have them sorted soon o/
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After the game exiting right at the start on the gunsmoke right after loading bar for the first day or two, they put out a launcher patch and game patch (2. 6GB) and I was able to run the game and get one crash. Further launcher patches but no game patches and I havent had a crash again. Running Ryzen 5 2600X, RX 580 8GB, 16GB 3200Mhz GSkill Trident Z and have almost everything at Ultra and just tweaked a couple of the slider bars down, like for water. Hope those still having issues will have them sorted soon o/
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