Of all the different games and synthetic tests we use here at PCMag to benchmark the latest graphics cards, perhaps none is as punishing as Rockstar’s love letter to the Old West, Red Dead Redemption 2.
There are several reasons why the title has won hundreds of Game of the Year awards, but its visuals (particularly in the PC version) have almost always topped the list. Played at 4K resolution with all graphical settings cranked to Ultra, Red Dead Redemption 2 is in this reviewer’s opinion the best-looking game on the market, even two years after its initial debut.
But good-looking games come at a price, one that continues to be grossly inflated in 2021 by scalpers and GPU-buying bots around the globe. As one of the most beautiful games ever made, RDR2 also happens to be our most hardware-intensive benchmark, sending all but the highest-end graphics cards like Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 Ti running for the hills of Montana as soon as 4K tests begin. So if you want to play Red Dead Redemption 2 at Ultra detail, but are still using a lower-tier or older generation of GeForce RTX-based GPU, what’s your next best option?
Why, it’s DLSS, of course! Nvidia’s latest update to its AI-assisted supersampling technology DLSS, “DLSS 2.0” (and its iterative versions thereafter, such as DLSS 2.2), have slowly been gaining in broader game adoption since launching last March. But, while Nvidia has managed to snag some big name games since then (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Fortnite among them), even three years after the launch of version 1.0, DLSS is still only supported on around 60 titles in total.
Nvidia gets to add one more in its cap, though, and it’s a big one. This week, RDR2 finally got the update that many have been waiting patiently for since its announcement earlier in the year, adding Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling—which taps a neural network to upscale images to a higher resolution with smaller speed penalty—as an option in the graphics menu. We’ve tested every iteration of the tech so far, from DLSS 1.0 to the current version 2.2 supported by Red Dead Redemption 2, and found some pretty incredible performance gains in AAA games like the graphics-intensive Death Stranding and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. In those runs, DLSS was capable of increasing both the frame rate and the overall sharpness of the image, delivering an average of 40% more frames per second depending on the DLSS quality setting being used.
So how much will DLSS 2.2 help one of the most punishing PC titles? Let’s dig into some testing to find out.
Red Dead Redemption 2: Performance Tested on DLSS 2.2
To remove as many variables as possible, we tested Red Dead Redemption 2 on our graphics card testbed (see its specs in our How We Test Graphics Cards article), using the GPU that Nvidia cited most often in its marketing materials for this update, the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition. The card proved reliable and stable during our original benchmarks, and straddles the line between midrange and high-end GPU performance for RDR2 going forward.
We first ran a benchmark of the game at each resolution to get a baseline result, and then performed two DLSS passes, one in Quality Mode and one in Ultra Performance Mode. Red Dead Redemption 2 also offers Balanced and Performance Modes, but we stuck to the slowest and fastest menu options, Quality and Ultra Performance, to get the range we wanted to draw our conclusions.
With Quality Mode activated at 4K resolution, we saw a roughly 18% gain in performance over the native benchmark run. This is impressive enough on its own, but from a visual standpoint, as with other DLSS 2.0 titles, we actually noticed an improvement in overall image quality with DLSS replacing the native render.
This is likely due to RDR2’s infamously poor TAA implementation, which has been widely criticized as fuzzy at best since the game’s PC release. DLSS is known for cleaning up edges better than most other anti-aliasing approaches out there, so while it’s not exactly surprising to see this result, it still feels a bit like magic when the game not only runs faster but manages to look better than a native render at the same time.
When comparing across the full range of DLSS settings, the performance gains in 4K were most impressive, with Ultra Performance Mode running a full 50% faster than native 4K. The gains, as always with DLSS, diminished from there as we went down the resolution tier list. For example, 1440p results returned a max gain of a mere 28% (we’re still impressed, just less so), between Ultra Performance Mode and native.
The gains were smaller still at 1080p resolution, which saw a net gain of 19% between native resolution and DLSS tuned to its fastest setting. As has been the case for most of its lifetime, DLSS is a technology that generally favors 4K players first.
Red Dead Redemption 2 DLSS Screenshots
(Click the button in the top right corner of the slideshow below for the option to view these images in full screen mode.)
The illusion drops off fast, though. Once you move into anything below Quality Mode (Balanced, Performance, or whatever), individual leaves start to blend together and distant foliage starts to blob up, to coin a technical term.
That said, you really have to be looking for it to see the degradation in most cases. If you’re right on the cusp of hitting 60fps (or whatever your frame rate goal may be) with your current GPU, picking the right DLSS mode for your vision level and available hardware and doing a bit of fine-tuning should get you there in almost any configuration. Red Dead Redemption 2 was already a gorgeous game, and now that it can reliably run at 60fps on more hardware than ever, I wouldn’t be surprised to see its numbers on Steam Charts shoot up again as people strap on their boots, hop on their horses, and boot up to experience Arthur Morgan’s story at buttery-smooth frame rates.
Red Dead Redemption 2 Looks Its Best With DLSS
If AMD’s DLSS competitor, Fidelity FX Super Resolution or FSR, really is as easy to implement as the company claims it is, it may not be long before we see Big Red offering its own supersampling alternative for RDR2 in the near future. Until then, though, if you want the fastest frame rates possible and the best-looking version of Red Dead Redemption 2 seen to date, DLSS 2.2 on a GeForce RTX GPU is the only way to go.
