I genuinely don't see how a game can look so mediocre graphics wise yet perform so badly? Sure the lighting is pretty and the snow looks great but some of the texture work is downright terrible. Snow on trees and the trees themselves don't look all that impressive. I was expecting a lot more to be honest after seeing the screenshots and trailers. Just hasn't given me that "wow" factor yet, the new COD did a few times, and older games like Witcher 3, Metro Exodus, all looked better to me. Maybe its down to individual visual tastes but I don't see the wow factor to be honest.
You have to get out of Chapter 1 when the world really opens up and isn't hindered by the snow haze of the mountains.
I'm one of the people having this issue (can't get past the first 2 seconds of the intro cinematic with the smoke) and I'm not even using a 3rd party AV. Tried disabling Windows Defender too, to no avail. WTF Rockstar? And best part about all this? EGS tells me I've already played the game for 19 minutes!
May I ask what video card you are using, I am assuming it's not the HD4850..... I don't think that even supports Vulkan API?
I suspect the game may suffer from a huge memory leak. A few hours into the Story mode I got a crash into the desktop with an error from the game/Rockstar Game Launcher. Checked quickly HWiNFO and noticed Virtual Memory with a maximum of almost 100% in red. Wasn't my OC settings; restarted the computer anyway to make sure to free up all the memory. Great performance on my system: Ryzen 9 3900X, Radeon RX 5700 XT, 16 GB DDR4 3666 MHz, using Vulkan High Preset with Ultra Textures, High TAA at 2560x1080 and running normally between 60 - 80 fps. Cheers, guys! PS. Now that I think about it, I gotta check my virtual memory configuration on Windows, as I believe I changed something following an online guide for maximum performance for Cemu emulator. Bad thing is I lost all the progress in the mission I was doing in Story mode
I don't think people are negative to the visuals. But the performance and optimisation feels sub-par. With my 9900K@5.0GHz, 4133MHz DDR4 and 2080 Ti Water-cooled I'd expect to run this at 4K@60Hz with the same visual fidelity as on my Xbox One X. But in order to achieve a stable 60 FPS+ I can't really run anything on Ultra. The best balance for me so far has been setting everything to high besides textures which is set to Ultra. Then I get a stable 60 FPS. If I try setting various things to Ultra I'm closer to a stable 30 FPS than I' am 60 FPS and this is running 3440x1440 which is quite a few less pixels compared to 3840x2160. The Xbox One X was running a stable 30 FPS at native 3840x2160 and comparing high settings to my Xbox One X game-play it doesn't look that different. So I'm pushing less pixels, but I'm getting twice the performance. That's decent I suppose, but I expect my 8-core, 16-thread 5.0GHz CPU and 2080 Ti Water-cooled GPU to beat the Xbox One X by quite a lot. But this isn't my biggest issue to be honest. My biggest issue is how I can't really get it to look as sharp as it did on my Xbox One X without killing my performance. I was playing the game on Xbox One X connected to my Asus PG348Q, so it was outputting 2560x1440 instead of 3440x1440. The Xbox One X was rendering in native 2160P/4K regardless, so I got a down-sampled output with what I suppose is TAA on the Xbox One X and it looks real sharp and the visual fidelity seems to be equal to high settings on PC. All this with a stable 30 FPS. The equivalent resolution for me to run this with the same down-sampling on my ultrawide would be to render at 5120x2160 but that is just not going to work out. I have to lower the settings to low-medium and even then I won't be getting a stable 60 FPS. So I have to run in at 3440x1440 but the problem is that using TAA when there is no super-sampling or down-sampling from a higher resolution TAA just makes things look blurry. It's not coming off as sharp as the Xbox One X version. Avoiding TAA in order to not get the blur causes huge issues with aliasing. Running without TAA or MSAA and things look horrible at a distanse, it just becomes a gritty mess. 2x MSAA is not enough to fix the aliasing but going any higher kills performance. So no matter how I tweak this I can't really get the game looking as sharp as it did on my Xbox One X without having to go way below 60 FPS and this is on a 2080 Ti ...
It's not quite the same, but try using the ingame taa together with the sharpening filter in the nvidia control panel - it at least makes it more bearable.
I will give that a go. Looking forward to Digital Foundry and their analysis. There are just way too many settings to fiddle with and it's way too hard to judge the difference in quality during the benchmarking to really figure out what would be the optimal visual/performance ratio. Many of the settings even require you to restart the game and the benchmark takes forever to finish and you don't really want to skip the last portion of the benchmark as it's easily the most important one. It might be that I will be capable of running this at 150% resolution scale with settings that would make the game look just as good as the Xbox One X but the time and effort needed to actually figure all this out and to tweak the settings when there are so many of them and the entire process take so long it's just not going to happen. It also seems like the benchmark is somewhat busted? The minimum FPS during the benchmark is below 60 FPS on my 2080 Ti running at 3440x1440 even if I put everything at the lowest setting. There is clearly something going on during the benchmark that makes the FPS hitch which is affecting the average score. I have played for a few hours and my FPS counter has been above the average I got from the benchmark pretty much all of the time. But then again, nothing early on in the game is as complex as the Saint Denis portion that you get in the end of the benchmark.
Love it on PC! Can't believe how bad i'm with aiming now that i got used to the controller auto aim on PS4. This feels really realistic.
Yes I have, and like I said the lighting and view distances are excellent but some of the up close textures are simply bad. Like the snow on peoples clothes just looks like low res pixels, flat and not really that great. It also doesn't help that seen as this is mainly a 3rd person game those textures at the first area are right in your face so they stood out to me. I still don't see how this performs so badly on PC on even the highest of rigs. I have a 3900X, 1080Ti, 16GB 3200MHz RAM, 512GB Samsung NVME SSD. This is the first game I have had to drop my refresh rate down from 144Hz to 60Hz and enable Half Vsync for 30fps @ 1440p Ultra preset for a stable experience. At the same settings (ultra preset I haven't changed anything other than using Vulkun) with Vsync off and fps uncapped its around 40-80fps depending on the scene. Now I didn't expect 100+fps of course not, but at least 60-90fps if not just a steady 60fps. I will wait for Digital Foundaries video on this and see what setting Alex recommends as he is generally spot on with his opinion. A 720p video really doesn't help. I have got to this area and further and I am sorry but other than view distances and lighting the game really does not look that good. Other than seeing the distance from the second camp site on the mountain in Chapter 1 nothing has made me go "wow". I do like the little touches they have implemented, like when you hunt the deer in the snow area and place them on your horse when you are riding back you can see the deer's bellies moving I thought that was a really great touch. I am almost certain they killed a deer in real life and placed motion trackers on its body and then began throwing it around lol.
Fantastic game on console is (unsurprisingly) still a fantastic game on PC, the definitive version for sure with enhanced visuals that you can tweak to your tastes. On my PC, it booted up at 3840x2160 on a mix of Medium/High settings but out of curiosity I cranked everything up to max settings except for MSAA which I left off (Reflection MSAA was set to 2X though). The benchmark does a great job of showcasing the overall performance of the game, although the first first sections seem oddly inappropriate, focusing on vast empty landscapes at various times of day before showing a longer gameplay-style section. The last bit is the most important as it shows how well the game will run while playing it. On my PC at the settings stated I got an average of around 30 fps which while not ideal is still offering a console-like experience at 4K but with richer, more detailed graphics and far superior lighting in my opinion. Anyway, I switched to 2560x1440 with the same maxed out settings and played about 2-3 hours of the game to Chapter II with a framerate between 30 and 55 fps, which mostly hovered around the 40-45 fps. Thanks to G-SYNC, the game always felt smooth even if the variation in framerates was still obvious. I'm loath to lower any of the settings at the moment until Digital Foundry or Hardware Unboxed do their optimal settings guide. The game looks so good maxed out that it's hard to play it on anything lower! And from what I've read even a 2080 Ti cannot max this game out at 4K anyway and at 2560x1440 it is only just averaging above 60 fps. RDR2 certainly seems like a game made with future hardware in mind!
On high i getting 70 - 90 fps very smooth but after 10 mins i get very strange stutter even though FPS stay 70-90's Single player and online gonna stop playing wait for fix.
I recorded using MSI Afterburner, the video is compressed to lower resolution and 30fps. I swear I'm in the freakin twilight zone, I can't believe how many people are complaining about a Triple A Rockstar game. A lot of people need to get their head checked.
Maybe like I said, its preference or opinion. I do like the game, its really fun to play its just that I prefer frame rate over visuals and I expected much better performance from my 1080Ti which should be around 2080 level of performance if not slightly better. Yes, I get it their are other factors in mind like GPU architecture and improvements but this game came out on consoles over a year ago and at 4K resolution... on a CPU that is super out dated. And we wait a year to play a game that to my eye doesn't look that impressive. If it looked the exact same as it does now at Ultra settings but the frame rate was 15-20% higher I would be super impressed. As fluidity, smoothness, responsiveness, to me in a game goes a long way to make a game looks good. If moving in a game feels like a stutter or slowdown fest going from 70fps to 40fps than I am sorry it could be a CGI trailer quality but if the fps is low or all over the place that is a deal breaker for me.
