A few days ago, the long-awaited PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 has arrived. However, it seems that the game has had a rough launch, with a lot of performance problems. I also got a chance to get my hands on the game, and from what I've experienced, it saddens me to says that the PC-port of this game is a big mess. The game itself is great, but this port is not.
According to many who have pre-ordered the game, just to download and install the game from the Rockstar Games Launcher is a chore - when the download getting interrupted randomly for a bunch of time. As for me, during the release day, I've let the game download overnight, only wake up in the morning and see the download bar stops at 8GB downloaded. 8/112.5 GB, which is less than 10% of the game size - along with a notification box from Rockstar Games Launcher asking me to resume downloading. After some random pauses, I've finally completed the download - after a day.
However, the pains continued.
While some players have reported that the game randomly crashed many times while they are playing the game, with a generic error message without any error code: “Red Dead Redemption 2 has exited unexpectedly,” I've only encountered the crash once. However, as for me, the game stuttering so bad that it's almost unplayable.
The stuttering happens at the interval of a few minutes, and it freezes the game for a few seconds. It happens during both gameplay and cutscenes - which is understandable, as the cutscene of this game is rendered in real-time. And it even happens more frequently when I access the photo mode of the game. Installing the game to the SSD instead of HDD doesn't help, either.
Many people also reported the stuttering problems, and their guess is because of the game's bug that led to CPU usage spiked to 100% during the freeze - which I myself has also experienced. Some blame the game's graphics API for this - as switching from Vulkan to DX12 solves the problems. However, I'm using the DX12 and still suffered from the stuttering, so the API might not be the reason for this.
Back on Wednesday, Rockstar Game has released a patch both for the launcher and the game, and my guess is to fix the downloading problems for the launcher. As for the game, though, the patch notes only mentioned about fixing the random crash issues - but according to some players, they still encountered those random crashes after the patch. The reason for it might due to the conflict with some anti-virus software - and as of now, Rockstar's support page still recommending players to disable their anti-virus software while playing the game to avoid crashes. Of course, this solution is not ideal at all, being more like a workaround than a solution.
And worse, some players even reported that the update only makes the game run worse, and not fixing any problems.
It's really sad when one of the most anticipated PC releases of the year has faced a lot of problems at their launch like this. The game is really great, as expected from the game that has taken the world by storm last year when it was released on the PS4. The game looks really beautiful - if your hardware is good enough, it looks way more beautiful than the PS4 version. However, as of now, I'll have to keep my hype for the game in check, until Rockstar fix all the problem so that I can actually enjoy the game without crashes or stutters.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is now available on PC via Epic Games Store and Rockstar's Digital games store, with a Steam version coming this December.
Comments