Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2 has finally received the DLSS treatment with a new update that just launched today. According to testing from Nvidia, you can expect around a 45% frame rate bump by running the game in performance mode at 4K and max settings with an RTX 20 series or 30 series graphics cards.
It's great to see Red Dead Redemption 2 finally getting Nvidia's image reconstruction technology. When the game launched it was notorious for being seriously demanding on GPU hardware, to the point where the then-flagship RTX 2080 Ti could not hit 60FPS at 4k resolution unless you dropped the image quality settings a bit.
Now with the DLSS update, you can expect your 2080 Ti to hit 60FPS in performance mode (according to Nvidia's testing) at 4K resolutions, at least with DLSS in performance mode, which is 1080p reconstructed to 4K.
Products from the Ampere lineup also fare well with the DLSS update, the RTX 3060 12GB can achieve almost 45FPS with the same DLSS settings and resolution compared to just 30FPS with no DLSS. If we jump up to Nvidia's current flagship (well, technically it's the penultimate Ampere, as there's still the RTX 3090), the RTX 3080 Ti can deliver around 85 fps instead of just 59 fps.
Unfortunately, Nvidia only tested 4K resolutions with the performance mode of DLSS, so we have very little info on how well other settings and resolutions would perform. We wish Nvidia tested 1440p and 1080p specifically, as those resolutions are far more popular than 4K when it comes to gaming resolutions.
Luckily Red Dead Redemption 2 does come with the latest version of DLSS, version 2.2.10, which features noticeably better image quality than DLSS 2.0. Nvidia has been constantly updating DLSS since version 2.0 with several micro-updates, including revisions of DLSS 2.1 and 2.2. However, not all games update to the latest version of DLSS right off the bat, so it's nice to see Rockstar implementing the latest version of the algorithm for its first iteration of DLSS.
This shouldn't be a big issue, as you can manually update to the latest DLSS version yourself in any DLSS 2.0 supported game. If by chance Red Dead Redemption 2 ends up not running the latest version of DLSS in the future, or if you have another DLSS 2.x game that's lagging behind, it's potentially as simple as updating a DLL file yourself. (Nvidia makes no promises that will work, though in our testing so far it seems to do just fine.)
