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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  • 29a - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    No iGPU tests?
  • Alistair - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Quote from Ars Technia: Rocket Lake-S gets a small but noticeable upgrade to its integrated graphics performance—the 10th-generation Core CPU's UHD 630 graphics gets bumped up to UHD 750. While it is an improvement, it's nothing to write home about—if you were hoping for an equivalent to Intel's Iris Xe graphics in Tiger Lake laptop CPUs (or AMD's Vega 11 in desktop APUs) you'll be sorely disappointed.

    A modest GeForce GTX 1060 is good for a Time Spy Graphics score of roughly 4,000. Intel's flagship i7-1185G7 laptop CPU manages nearly half that at 1572, with AMD's Vega 11 lagging noticeably behind at 1226. Rocket Lake-S' UHD 750 comes in at a yawn-inducing 592—a little less than half the performance of Vega 11 and a little more than one-third the performance of Iris Xe.
  • KaarlisK - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Also, notice that i5 11400 has UHD Graphics 730, which has less EUs (24 not 32). So with the cheapest i5 (10400->11400) there may actually be a regression in iGPU performance.
  • Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Sounds like even on as advanced a process as 14nm+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ that yields aren't exactly that spectacular then for this backport.
  • tipoo - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Well density definitely isn't.
  • III-V - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Why in the world would you come to that conclusion?
  • firewolfsm - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    Because Intel generally hasn't had to cut the IGP for i5 models in the past. The cut indicates they're producing chips with bad EUs.
  • KaarlisK - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link

    In the past, they could offload half-funcioning GPUs to Pentiums and Celerons. There are no Rocket Lake i3s even...
  • Alistair - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    I was bored, so I went and bought the i5-11500 just to test Intel Xe haha. I'll post benchmarks later.
  • Alistair - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link

    Ok it gets ~40 fps in Overwatch at 1080p, and ~100fps at 50 percent of 1080p (scaling at higher resolutions is bad with DDR memory). Ouch. Not great. Usable, but not great. This is with very fast memory. DDR4 3600 C16.

    Now I'm going to try Runeterra.

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