How to play Red Dead Redemption 2 on a Low-End PC

Red Dead Redemption 2 stays one of the most beautiful and realistic games to date. Despite it coming out almost 3 years ago it still holds up in terms of visuals and is without a doubt a game for ages. Beautiful flora, water physics, snow, trees and insanely detailed living creatures from NPC’s to a large variety of animals.
It all comes at a cost, the game is over 100GB in size and a nightmare for a Low-end PC. Well, we love a challenge and decided to force Rockstars Beautiful open world to work on a Low-end PC.

The In-Game Settings

Obviously, the first step would be to set all the in-game settings to low and much like any other Rockstar games Red Dead Redemption 2 comes with a lot of options. All the settings set to the lowest at 720p gave me an unstable experience that simply wasn’t playable on my Athlon duo core. So, it was time to turn on the Low-spec mode and force Red Dead Redemption 2 to work on a Low-end PC. Here is a quick tip in the settings menu under Advanced enables Resolution scale and change it to 50% or 75% to gain a few fps. It scales all the textures at a lower resolution and takes a lot of pressure off the tiny struggling integrated GPU.

Let’s Run Red Dead Redemption 2 on a Low-End PC

Forcing Begins!

The game uses Vulkan API and DirectX 12 only, and on a not so powerful hardware, Vulkan seems to perform better and should be used. Since the in-game settings didn’t do any good for us it was time to head into the config files and make changes manually. The config file is located in the documents folder Rockstar Games\Red Dead Redemption 2\Settings and is called system.xml which you can open with notepad++. (Notepad++ allows you to edit text files of different formats with ease download here).

Before opening the config file make sure all the in-game settings are set to the lowest or you can manually change all the settings to ‘Low’ from their default value.Bonus tip- The game allows ‘Medium’ as the lowest possible value for some settings like the ‘Fur Quality’ you can force them to ‘Low’ through the Config File.

Disabling Water reflections.

The game has one of the best water physics systems and quality a game has ever had! The enhanced water reflections look extremely good but do Low-spec gamers really need that? The Water reflections are controlled by the following Line – <waterReflectionSSR value=”true”>.

Setting this value to false changes the value in the settings to ‘custom‘ which is the value set by us. The reflections are still there but are a lot less computationally expensive!

Lod Scale

The game uses a Lod scaler mechanic to render models like grass, vehicles and all creatures at a particular distance. The game has different values which determine the scale for the pedestrians, grass, vehicles and more. Here things get interesting the Lodscale value by default is set to 1 and for some reason, if the value is set anywhere below 0.75 things get weird.

It might be a good idea to not mess with this.

However, the Grass, vehicle and pedestrian lod values can be pushed all the way back to -0.9! And putting them at -1 can cause interesting effects.

Grass lod set to 0 disables grass entirely and provides vehicle lod at 0 just stops rendering vehicles. While setting pedestrian lod to -1 can lead to extremely low-poly character models like shown below!

This just simply breaks the game. After a lot of testing of the values here is our recommended settings for lod scaling!

And here are the results with the above values.The grass, vehicles and character only get rendered when fairly close, pushing the value down even more can cause the game to look too bad as the models would be too low-poly even when up-close.

After reducing the Lod scale the performance improvement was significant! I was able to finish the game at 1024X768 resolution with stable framerates. If your system still struggles to run the game try to lower the values even more, although a value lower than -0.9 is not recommended. Next, follow our guide here to improve the gaming performance of your computer by 20-30%.