Red Dead Redemption 2 has had something of a rough launch on PC. While the game happily runs at console-equivalent settings, Rockstar’s questionable scaling choices mean that Ultra is simply out of the question in most scenarios.
So what do you do with a game that’s an absurd performance hog that no one can max out? Why you make a Reshade path-tracing preset, of course, so people still won’t be able to max it out in 2029. Pascal Gilcher’s path-tracing shader for Reshade works with plenty of games and it does noticeably improve lighting. It comes with a massive performance hit, though.
Youtuber Digital Dreams recently posted a video of the path tracing shader in use with Red Dead Redemption 2. The results are almost too painful to watch. Yes, you get shinier lighting, and yes it looks (marginally) better. But it’s at the cost of what looks like a sub 15-FPS framerate. On the GeForce 1080 Ti. Good luck running this, Arjun from the future.
Even without path-tracing enabled, Red Dead Redemption 2 is an incredible game–both in terms of visuals and the overall experience. And, despite launch troubles, PC is the best platform to play it on. And if you like watching your hardware try and fail, there’s always Reshade path-tracing.