Red Dead Redemption PC port review – looks and works better than ever

The original Red Dead Redemption was a prisoner of seventh-generation consoles until recently. While backwards compatibility made the game playable on modern Xbox hardware, Rockstar had to port it to the PS4 and Switch separately. On PC, however, the situation was much sadder, as it was only playable under emulation. That’s changing now, as Rockstar has finally brought John Marston’s story to PC gamers, five years after they experienced his association with Dutch van der Linde in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Simply put, the PC port of Red Dead Redemption does the job, but leaves a lot to be desired for enthusiasts. While it includes modern scaling features such as DLSS/FSR, some technical decisions feel dated and options exhibit somewhat bizarre behavior. In terms of scalability, RDR 1 on PC doesn’t offer anything substantial over the existing PS4 version, aside from a higher frame rate.

First of all, the keyboard and mouse controls for RDR work well. The original game features less interaction and systems than the sequel, so I expected the controls to map out without any issues.

The graphics menu is barebones with options to change just four elements: shadows and detail levels of geometry, trees, and grass. There’s no fancy ambient occlusion setting and nothing to control the post-processing effects. Red Dead Redemption is a very simple-looking game, and the lack of additional graphical options doesn’t really bother me – especially considering this is a straight port of an old classic.

I played the game on a PC equipped with the Ryzen 7 5700X3D and an Nvidia Geforce RTX 4080, and the game barely pushed these components to reach the 144fps frame rate limit. At 4K with DLAA, I was comfortably galloping on horseback across the open desert roads at over 100 fps.

During my testing with all presets, my RTX 4080 barely went above 60% GPU usage. That doesn’t mean the game always ran at its maximum frame rate, as we’ll see below.

Strangely enough, enabling frame generation caused a spike in GPU usage, with the output frame rate well above 200 fps. There are two options that don’t seem to work well at the moment, namely the level of detail for grass and trees. Setting these to their maximum values ​​put a lot of strain on the CPU, and I couldn’t get the game to 144fps even on my high-end PC.

In addition, the port is stable and bug-free. I also tested the game on the Steam Deck OLED and it runs just as well there. Somewhat surprisingly, RDR has a great implementation of HDR despite the limited color palette. When enabled and properly calibrated, the game looks vibrant on the Steam Deck OLED and compatible HDR monitors.

At the time of writing, there are already more than a hundred mods that improve the game’s visuals and performance. Combined with PC-exclusive image filtering like Nvidia Freestyle, it opens Red Dead Redemption up to new possibilities, freeing it from the shackles of the closed systems that are consoles.

The PC port of Red Dead Redemption works just as well as expected, although some technical shortcomings may leave enthusiasts disappointed. Even then, it becomes the ideal way to play Rockstar’s cowboy simulator with its improved frame rate and visuals.

Red Dead Redemption is available on PC, PS4, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One. The game is playable on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S via backwards compatibility.