Red Dead Redemption 2 PC Stutters and Crashes in Almighty Messy Launch
Read Dead Redemption 2's PC launch hasn't gone smoothly. | Source: Rockstar Games
- The PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 launched to great fanfare yesterday.
- All manner of problems ranging from performance issues to launcher issues plague the game.
- Rockstar’s response has been underwhelming and players have pooled their resources to find solutions themselves as a consequence.
As a growing number of players jump into Arthur Morgan’s rugged cowboy adventure, not all is peachy. Performance-wise, the PC version of Red Dead Redemption 2 leaves a lot to be desired, to put it lightly.
Red Dead Redemption 2’s Many Issues
While some players are plagued with FPS drops, CPU spike freezes , and stuttering , others are outright unable to launch the game. It appears the Rockstar Launcher is failing to start correctly in some instances or worse, crashing unexpectedly , and even demanding activation despite players purchasing genuine copies of Red Dead Redemption 2. Some players are stuck on loading screens unable to progress further.
Other issues include sketchy audio, Rockstar launcher authorization problems, botched asset rendering , dodgy truncated UI, and the game not using the full capability of graphics cards.
Then there are the crashes. Players report the game crashing to the desktop during the game’s opening segment. Others suffer the same fate when tinkering with the game’s settings and even trying to access Red Dead Online.
Interestingly, the issues appear to be affecting players indiscriminately. From those with top of the line gaming rigs sporting the latest NVIDIA RTX powerhouse to those barely scraping past the recommended requirements, Red Dead Redemption 2 is proving a frustrating experience across the board.
Players Hunt For Solutions As Rockstar Offers Underwhelming Support
As you can imagine, the usual social media haunts, Reddit in particular, are awash with players desperately pooling their resources to find solutions . Some report success when relaunching and logging back into the Rockstar Launcher. Downloading the latest NVIDIA/AMD drivers, disabling anti-virus, updating/downgrading the BIOS works for some. While others circumvent the issues by changing the in-game graphics API to DirectX 12.
A portion of players have even fixed issues by turning off CPU cores manually . Not exactly the kind of temporary fixes you’d expect from a AAA release from one of gaming’s most prominent developers.
To curb the Rockstar Launcher issues, the developer pushed out a patch late yesterday , which aims to fix initialization, preload decryption, and various launch/exit issues.
Rockstar Games’ support portal for Red Dead Redemption 2 is pretty light on content as of writing and seemingly doesn’t offer all that much in terms of viable solutions. Only 169 out of 890 people think the ‘RDR2 on PC General Troubleshooting’ support page provides useful fixes . Damning stuff.
