Red Dead Redemption 2 Graphics: Settings That Actually Matter

Red Dead Redemption 2 graphics still hold up eight years on, and the PC version hands you about forty toggles to prove it. Most of them are nearly free. A handful will halve your frame rate.

The expensive ones

• MSAA. The single biggest cost in the menu — multiplying the cost of an already heavy renderer. Leave it off and use TAA, which is the default and looks better for the price.
• Near Volumetric Resolution. Controls fog and mist close to Arthur and is brutally expensive. Medium is the sweet spot. Far Volumetric Resolution costs almost nothing, so leave that high.
• Water Physics. A slider, not a preset. Past roughly halfway it simulates ripples you cannot see at riding speed.
• Reflection Quality. Heavy, and mostly visible standing still by a lake.

Free wins

Both Vulkan and DirectX 12 are offered, and which one wins genuinely depends on your GPU — benchmark five minutes in Saint Denis on each rather than trusting a forum. DLSS arrived in the 13 July 2021 patch and is the cheapest performance you will find on an RTX card.

Consoles in 2026

There is still no native PS5 or Xbox Series version. The game runs through backward compatibility and stays capped at 30fps. Rumours of a 60fps re-release have circulated for years, and Rockstar has confirmed nothing — the 60fps footage doing the rounds comes from modded hardware, not an official build.