If you haven’t played Red Dead Redemption 2 yet, the PC version came out this week and you’ve got a new chance prove whether you’re a deer or a wolf. The game looks pretty incredible with real improvements that just dip you into the waters of this immersive game.
I checked it out on a PC with real-time ray tracing effects on an Nvidia GeForce graphics card with real-time ray tracing and one of Advanced Micro Devices’ fastest new Ryzen processors.
It took a couple of days for Rockstar to fix a problem that prevented me from playing the game on an AMD-based gaming rig. But once the fix was out on Friday, I was able to play through the first hour and 10 minutes of the game. I’ve included the video of that gameplay in this post.
Right from the very first frame of the cinematics, you can see how good it looks. And when the gameplay begins and you start riding your house, it still looks like the cinematics are running. When Arthur and Dutch ride through the snowstorm, you can see the shadows dancing around on the ground in a crazy kind of light show. You can see the same cool lighting with dark shadows or soft shadows at the house where they meet the O’Driscolls. There’s a water puddle on the floor of the barn that reflects imagery in the room.
Of course, the characters still seem to move a bit slow. I suppose there isn’t much change in the mobility, as you can see in the big gunfight battle or the animations when you’re looking dead bodies. But it sure looks pretty with all of the snowflakes falling throughout all of the scenes.
I played on a Falcon Northwest Talon machine. The 20th-anniversary edition features a custom insignia on the front of the machine. It has options for glass or solid metal sides. Like the first Talon two decades ago, it features a processor from Advanced Micro Devices. In my case, the machine had an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 Core CPU.
It also features an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics card, with 32 gigabytes of G.Skill Memory, a Samsung 970 Pro 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD, an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero X570 chipset motherboard, liquid cooling, an EVGA G3 750 Watt power supply, custom wiring by CableMod, Microsoft’s Windows 10 Pro software, and a (separately priced) curved Asus ROG monitor.
I played the game at a resolution of 2560 x 1440 at 60 frames per second. Just about everything was turned up to the highest settings.
Just for fun, you can see how Red Dead Redemption 2 looked on the PlayStation 4 when I uploaded this video a year ago.
You can get the game on the Rockstar Games Launcher. Or you can get it on the Epic Games Store. If you wait until December, you can get it on Steam.
Disclosure: Falcon Northwest provided me with a machine for the purpose of this review. Our coverage remains objective.
Author: Dean Takahashi
Source: Venturebeat
