Red Dead Redemption 2 is now Playable at 8K with Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090: Even a three years after its release, Red Dead Redemption 2 continues to be one of the most beautiful looking games ever. The game is phenomenal on consoles, but its true potential churns out on PC.

Now, with the latest update in Nvidia’s DLSS tech, we’ve returned to see if we can finally play the game in full 8K glory.

Back in 2019, a trial was done to see if Red Dead Redemption 2 runs at 8K with Nvidia Titan RTX graphics card. During that time, it was the most powerful GPU Nvidia had ever made.

Unfortunately, the test results were not what were expected. Despite full settings, Red Dead Redemption hit 18.65 fps on an average in the benchmark at the demanding 7,680 × 4,320 pixels.

However, this time the confidence of the team conducting the test was sky-rocketing. For starters, it shall be mentioned that over the past two years the game has had multiple updates, which have improved performance exponentially, including the latest one which adds DLSS.

Secondly, the testing team also replaced the Nvidia Titan RTX with the all new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090. Although Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 GPU is comparatively cheaper than the Titan RTX, it actually performs way better, due to the improvements brought in the RTX 30 Series cards by Nvidia.

The testing team tried several games to see how the new Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 performs at 8K compared to the Titan RTX, and to our surprise the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 delivered some impressive performance as far as FPS is concerned.

For example, in RDR 2 the Titan RTX could go up to 18.65 frames per second with maximum settings, whereas these days 60 fps is considered to be minimum for PC gaming, especially when it comes to ultra-high-end GPUs.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090, in comparison to Titan RTX is gets slightly better with 19.02 fps. However, the testing team went through some other tests with the latest update, with highest settings but the new DLSS feature off, and it hit a much better 25.3 fps. This leap could be thanks to Red Dead Redemption 2 updates.

With that base improvement, our hopes that Red Dead Redemption 2 at 8K could actually be a possibility.

NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) Feature

Red Dead Redemption 2 now supports DLSS, and it was one of the reasons why the testing team decided to try testing this game at 4K. Deep Learning Super Sampling is a feature that uses the tensor cores in Nvidia’s GeForce RTX cards to upscale a game’s resolution.

Because of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, it can take a game running at 1440p, and upscale it to 4K or even higher. Here, the catch is that the game which has been upscaled should appear like it was running at that higher resolution natively, but due to the fact that it is actually running at a lower resolution, it adds lesser pressure on your GPU.

This could then be used to allow lower-end GPUs achieve ‘higher’ resolutions, while smoothing out frame rate drops for more powerful cards, allowing them to keep a rock-solid fps.

The testing team has tried a number of games with DLSS and the results have been impressing. Though there are some differences between an upscaled game using DLSS and one running originally, they are not that noticeable, and most importantly, it facilitates enhanced performance without having any impact over graphics all that much. It also means that you can incorporate intensive graphical effects, like ray tracing, that your gaming rig might have originally struggled with.

So, we were keen to see the differences created by DLSS, especially at the ultra-high 8K resolution. The testing team played the game using ChillBlast 8K gaming PC, along with Dell’s UltraSharp UP3218K monitor.

Once the PC hit 25.3fps at 8K with highest level of graphical settings, and keeping everything else same, but turned DLSS to ‘Auto’, the results that came out were surprising, with it now doubling the frame rate by hitting 50fps on average.

Though it did not hit 60fps on average, it instantly made the game actually playable at 8K, something which was not possible without DLSS, which quotes a clear example of how much of a difference DLSS can make.

The minimum fps also rose from 21.5 to 29.7 fps, while the maximum frames per second nearly doubled from 31.3 to 62.2 fps. This leaps indicates that with some more improvisations and tweaking 60fps on average at 8K is possible, which was once believed to an unattainable feat.

In terms of visuals, it looked fantastic. Red Dead Redemption 2, like most of the other games, hasn’t been designed for 8K resolution, so textures aren’t going to benefit from the high resolution, but overall, DLSS has shown just what it is capable of.

Red Dead Redemption 2 offers several DLSS options, so we tested out ‘Quality’ mode next. This prioritizes graphics over performance, so the impact to visual quality is minimized, but then so to are the performance gains. This is because the resolution DLSS is upscaling from is higher. Still, it’s a decent bump, hitting 34.4 fps on average. That’s certainly playable, though we don’t think the visual benefits are worth the hit.

The ‘Balanced’ setting tries to find a line between image quality and performance, but it just hit 38.4, which makes us feel it’s still a little too weighted for image quality at the expense of performance.

Finally, there’s two performance options. We went straight for ‘Ultra Performance’ and hit 50.3 fps, which gives us the impression that ‘Auto’ tends towards performance, especially when you’re trying to really push the game at 8K.

By coming so close to 60fps with everything set to its highest graphical settings, it gave us flexibility to drop a few settings here and there, which helped us hit that 60fps goal.

This is incredibly exciting as it shows the potential of DLSS when it comes to 8K gaming, and as many of us hoped, it could mean that gaming at 7,680 × 4,320 resolutions will one day become more widespread and achievable, without having to invest in extremely expensive hardware.