Red Dead Redemption PC port review – looks and runs better than ever

Red Dead Redemption's long-awaited PC port works just as well as expected.

John Marston in Red Dead Redemption / Rockstar Games

The original Red Dead Redemption had been a prisoner of the seventh-generation consoles until recently. While the game was playable on modern Xbox hardware thanks to backward compatibility, Rockstar had to port it to the PS4 and Switch separately. On PC though, the situation has been much sadder, only being playable under emulation. That changes now, as Rockstar has finally brought John Marston’s story to PC gamers, five years after they experienced his dealings with Dutch van der Linde in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Simply put, Red Dead Redemption’s PC port does the job but leaves a lot to be desired for enthusiasts. While it includes modern upscaling features like DLSS/FSR, some technical decisions feel dated and options exhibit slightly bizarre behavior. As for scalability, RDR 1 on PC isn’t offering anything substantial over the existing PS4 version besides a higher frame rate.

Rockstar Games

First things first, the keyboard and mouse controls for RDR work well. The original game features less interaction and systems than its sequel, so I would’ve expected its controls to be mapped without issues.

The graphics menu is barebones with options to alter only four elements: shadows and detail levels of geometry, trees, and grass. There’s no fancy ambient occlusion setting and nothing to control post-processing effects. Red Dead Redemption is a very simple-looking game, and the lack of extra graphics options doesn’t really bother me — especially considering this is a straight port of an old classic.

Rockstar Games

I played the game on a PC equipped with the Ryzen 7 5700X3D and an Nvidia Geforce RTX 4080, and the game barely pushed these components to hit its frame rate cap of 144fps. At 4K with DLAA, I was comfortably gallivanting through the open desert roads on horseback at over 100fps.

Throughout my testing across all presets, my RTX 4080 barely went over 60% GPU usage. That doesn’t mean the game was always running at its maximum frame rate, which we’ll get to below. 

Curiously, enabling frame generation saw GPU usage spike to the maximum, with the output frame rate going well over 200fps. There are two options that currently don’t seem to work well, those being the level of detail settings for grass and trees. Setting those to their max values hit the CPU hard, and I couldn’t get the game up to 144fps even on my high-end PC.

Rockstar Games

Besides that, the port is stable and bug-free. I also tested the game on the Steam Deck OLED and it runs just as well there. Somewhat surprisingly, RDR has a great implementation of HDR despite its limited color palette. When enabled and calibrated correctly, the game looks vibrant on the Steam Deck OLED and compatible HDR monitors.

At the time of writing, there are already over a hundred mods improving the game’s visuals and performance. Combined with PC-exclusive image filtering like Nvidia Freestyle, it opens up Red Dead Redemption to new possibilities, freeing it from the shackles of the closed systems that are consoles.

Red Dead Redemption’s PC port works just as well as expected, though some of its technical shortcomings may leave enthusiasts disappointed. Even then, it becomes the ideal way to play Rockstar’s cowboy simulator with its improved frame rate and visuals.

Red Dead Redemption is available on PC, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One. The game is playable on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S through backward compatibility.