There are plenty of folks who insist that you don’t need 60+ FPS to enjoy PC gaming, particularly open-world adventure epics like Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2. For such cinematic masterpieces, perhaps 30 FPS lows are tolerable? Well, prolific Danish YouTuber Mongo TV recently went viral, with his video series showing him ‘enjoying’ RDR2 at a glacial 4 FPS. In the source video, Mongo TV appears to blame the game’s poor performance on his aged laptop, which packs an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB.
Another key statement about the gameplay experience from Mongo TV is that it has taken “over 12 hours” to complete “all the many intro missions, up in the mountains in winter.” (machine translation from Danish). We assume that Mongo TV is referring to completing Chapter One: Colter. Based on various popular playthrough videos of this section of the game on YouTube, it looks like Colter typically takes between 1hr 45mins and 3hrs.
To put Mongo TV’s adventuring at 4 FPS into perspective, he took 12 hours progressing through chapter one instead of ~2 hours. So he’s playing 6x slower than average. Of course, the game is still running in ‘normal’ time, but gameplay progress at 4 FPS must be hindered by the incredibly unresponsive world view of your character.
According to some gaming stats sites, a typical RDR2 playthrough should take 78.5 hours. If we use the Mongo TV multiplier, our hero might instead be playing this for 471 hours to get to the finish line.
Please optimize settings
Before Mongo TV continues in his RDR2 journey, we’d love him to pause and do a little bit of game settings tuning. It should make the rest of the game far more pleasurable. Mongo TV’s gaming laptop features an "i5-8300H and a 1050ti with
4GB," according to various sources (the GPU is mentioned in the above embedded video description).
The YouTuber closes his video description by asking, “Should I give up on these great games for now, and then wait until I eventually get a faster gamer PC, with a better graphics card, than my very old GeForce TI 1050 4GB?” Well, we think he could do a lot better without splashing the cash on a new laptop. If we check the game’s minimum and recommended specifications, Mongo TV is using a device that is far better than the minimum specs.
Rockstar officially asks users to come packing an Intel Core i5-2500K / AMD FX 6300, 8GB of RAM, and GeForce GTX 770 2GB / Radeon R9 280 3GB at a minimum. On the CPU side, Mongo TV’s Intel CPU should be a big uplift vs those minimum baselines, as it boasts 4C/8T and a boost clock up to 4GHz.
Hopefully, Mongo TV also matches or beats the 8GB RAM minimum, too, or else that’s probably an easy upgrade (RAM stick addition/swap) to help this older laptop become a bit smoother in gaming.
The laptop GPU is also newer / better than those GeForce and Radeon baselines. The terrible frame rate could also be from the game running on the puny UHD Graphics 630 built into the Intel Core i5-8300H instead of switching to the GTX 1050 Ti. A quick settings check/tweak should see what’s really happening.
As we can be pretty certain the hardware is probably fine for RDR2 gaming at much more fluid frame rates, Mongo TV should also probably look at some optimization guides for this title on PC. A good start could be to make sure the GeForce driver is up to date. Then a quick poke at the Nvidia App will reveal the game library installed on the PC, with a one-button optimize setting. That’s surely a better start than whatever settings are currently being used to produce 4 FPS. Mongo TV, hosted by John, has published over 62,000 videos in the last 11 years
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