It’s still a little hard to believe that it’s actually happening, but tomorrow, the ultra-hyped Red Dead Redemption 2 is hitting the PC, able to be acquired at launch from Rockstar’s own store, Epic Games Store, Greenman Gaming, GameStop, or the Humble Store. Steam fans who don’t mind waiting a little bit will be able to dive in next month. Don’t you love artificial limitations?
RDR2 is one of the rarer releases that doesn’t have the technical backing support of AMD or NVIDIA, which means neither company has exclusive features found within. That includes NVIDIA’s RTX technologies, such as the shadow techniques we just explored in CoD: Modern Warfare. Still, RDR2 promises to deliver the best possible experience on the PC, which for any PC gamer shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Rockstar says that the PC iteration of the game will offer greater draw distances, higher-quality global illumination and ambient occlusion, better snow trails, reflections, and shadows, as well as tessellated tree textures and improved fur and grass. There’s of course also the ability to run at different resolutions, like 4K (and higher), or ultrawide. If you have an HDR monitor, you’ll fortunately be able to take proper advantage of it with RDR2.
In addition to all of the graphical toys that make RDR2 look best on the PC, the release of this version has introduced some other new features or items, as well. Three new Bounty Hunter missions have been added, for example, as well as two new gang hideouts. A brand-new M1899 pistol has been introduced, a semi-auto handgun with clip-loaded ammo, and some MP-only guns are making their way to single-player: Evans Repeater, High Roller Revolver, and Le Mat Revolver. This is just scraping the pile, so if you’re a console gamer moving over to PC and don’t want to miss anything new, you can check out the game page.
To get ahead of RDR2‘s launch, NVIDIA has released a new Game Ready driver for the game, versioned 441.12. In addition to supporting RDR2, it also enhances performance for Need for Speed Heat, and adds support for LG circa-2019 4K OLED TVs, such as the C9 and E9 series. The key thing to note here is that these are not FreeSync TVs supported on NVIDIA; they are true G-SYNC panels (and their prices will likely reflect that a bit).
AMD has not yet released a new driver specifically to greet RDR2‘s launch, but we’d expect to see one either today, or over the next couple of days.