Gaming Tests: Red Dead Redemption 2

It’s great to have another Rockstar benchmark in the mix, and the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) on the PC gives us a chance to do that. Building on the success of the original RDR, the second incarnation came to Steam in December 2019 having been released on consoles first. The PC version takes the open-world cowboy genre into the start of the modern age, with a wide array of impressive graphics and features that are eerily close to reality.

For RDR2, Rockstar kept the same benchmark philosophy as with Grand Theft Auto V, with the benchmark consisting of several cut scenes with different weather and lighting effects, with a final scene focusing on an on-rails environment, only this time with mugging a shop leading to a shootout on horseback before riding over a bridge into the great unknown. Luckily most of the command line options from GTA V are present here, and the game also supports resolution scaling. We have the following tests:

  • 384p Minimum, 1440p Minimum, 8K Minimum, 1080p Max

For that 8K setting, I originally thought I had the settings file at 4K and 1.0x scaling, but it was actually set at 2.0x giving that 8K.  For the sake of it, I decided to keep the 8K settings.

For our results, we run through each resolution and setting configuration for a minimum of 10 minutes, before averaging and parsing the frame time data.

AnandTech Low Resolution
Low Quality
Medium Resolution
Low Quality
High Resolution
Low Quality
Medium Resolution
Max Quality
Average FPS
95th Percentile

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Gaming Tests: GTA 5 Gaming Tests: Strange Brigade
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  • Beaver M. - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    Acting like GN and HUB gives them lots of AMD fanboy clicks/views.
  • Beaver M. - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    I guess living in isolation for a year makes people more and more antisocial and aggressive. And that then in turn sells well.
  • Qasar - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    so they are amd fanboys cause they told the truth ? more like you are the intel fanboy trying to defend this dud of a cpu. come on, most reviews say they same thing, just some are more harsh, and rightfully so
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    Tech fans are continually disappointed by the lack of adequate competition in a multitude of tech markets (e.g. GPUs, CPUs, search, leading-edge lithography machines/foundries, etc. etc.)

    We saw, way back in the 80s, what happens when competition is shut down. The Japanese seized the DRAM market by dumping, forcing American DRAM makers out of the market — then promptly raising prices drastically.

    We went from seeing revolutionary products like the Apple Lisa being replaced by years of toy-grade machines at very high prices. The Lisa shipped with 1 MB of RAM and the first Mac with just 128K. The Apple IIGS shipped with just 256K, many years after the Lisa. We can thank more than Apple's love of fat margins. We can thank inadequate competition.

    We have seen that play out, time and time again. Now, it's so bad that it's worse than the bread lines of the USSR. At least if one waited in one of those one might end up with some bread. These days, you have two choices: a line to get a very overpriced product (like the latest iPhone) or you can skip waiting in line because they're nothing to buy (GPUs).
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    (The Amiga 1000 only shipped with 256K of RAM, too, as I recall. It was a problem throughout the industry, not something due merely to Apple's margins.)
  • GeoffreyA - Saturday, April 3, 2021 - link

    I agree with your anti-corporation sentiment, but there's little we can do, except sigh. A worldwide boycotting of their products will work wonders but that'll never happen. As long as these rotters are out to make money---Intel, AMD, Google, the rest---it'll go on like this. Who knows, perhaps there's some vital link to entropy in all this, and why everything always goes awry on earth.
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    'One of the few tech sites that remained professional and didn't use click baity titles or disrespect intel.'

    This article uses bad spin to try to make Intel's product look better than it is.

    Just one example:

    ‘Intel has stated that in the future it will have cores designed for multiple process nodes at the same time, and so given Rocket Lake’s efficiency at the high frequencies, doesn’t this mean the experiment has failed? I say no, because it teaches Intel a lot in how it designs its silicon’

    The spin also includes the testing, using a really loud high-CFM CPU cooler in the Intel and a different quieter one on the AMD.

    It's a pile of spin, like the glorified press release stuff trying to turn CEO Pat into some sort of superhero. That stuff sounds like it was written for investors.
  • FirstStrike - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    Ian, you are missing SpecInt and SpectFp suite
  • Orkiton - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    I'm not either Intel or AMD "fanboy" though some sympathy to AMD due to unfair, anti-competitive Intel practices in the past and AMD merit to emerge from their ashes. That said, best wishes to both in the name of progress, innovation and better value to us, the consumers.
  • Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    The rated TDP is 125 W, although we saw 160 W during a regular load, 225 W peaks with an AVX2 rendering load, and 292 W peak power with an AVX-512 compute load.

    ‘Intel’s claimed TDP’ rather than ‘that rated’. The latter implies an independent rating standard/body.

    If both processors were found at these prices, then the comparison is a good one – the Ryzen 7 5800X in our testing scored +8% in CPU tests and +1% in gaming tests (1080p Max). The Ryzen is very much the more power-efficient processor, however the Intel has integrated graphics (an argument that disappears with KF at $374).

    Again, no specifics about the power consumption difference.

    On high-end gaming both processor performed the same, the AMD processor was ahead an average of 8% on CPU workloads, and the AMD processor came across as a lot more efficient and easy to cool, while the Intel processor scored a big lead in AVX-512 workloads.

    Again, no specifics about the power consumption difference.

    AGAIN, testing AMD with a weaker cooler, even though the CPU will go faster with the loud fast cooling you’re using on Intel.

    Makes it APPLES to APPLES.

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