Red Dead Redemption Remastered is CPU-bound on PC, even with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D

Rockstar has just released Red Dead Redemption Remastered on PC. And, to be honest, I wasn’t planning to cover it. You see, this is a remaster and we don’t usually benchmark them. However, after popular demand, I’ve decided to take a look at it. So, let’s see how this port runs on a high-end PC.

For these benchmarks, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 32GB of DDR5 at 6000Mhz, and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. We also used Windows 10 64-bit, and the GeForce 566.03 driver. I know there is a new driver for the game. Still, overall performance seemed already great. Moreover, we’ve disabled the second CCD on our 7950X3D.

As you may already know, the game is locked at 144FPS. Thankfully, though, you can use this mod to unlock the framerate. So, we’ve decided to use it so that we can see whether we were CPU bottlenecked. And the results really caught me off guard.

At 4K/Max Settings, our AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D was bottlenecking the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090. In the open-world area, the game was running with 143-151FPS. And, as we can clearly see, GPU usage was around 68%.

Hyper-Threading/SMT does not bring any performance gains, and it may have a negative effect on older CPUs. From what we could see, Red Dead Redemption Remastered mainly uses two CPU cores/threads. This means that you’ll need a CPU with fast IPC and fast memory modules to hit framerates higher than 150FPS. Again, this is for the open-world area. The indoor environments can easily hit 200FPS.

At first glance, getting 143FPS is not a bad thing, right? However, that’s with the fastest CPU available right now. Moreover, Red Dead Redemption looks like a PS3 game. So, you’d expect it to run better. Not only that but I can now see why some users on older CPUs may have trouble running it.

The good news here, at least for those with an RTX40 GPU, is that the game supports NVIDIA DLSS 3 Frame Generation. By using it, you can at least improve the game’s performance. Since we’re talking about a CPU bottleneck, DLSS 3 Super Resolution will not improve your performance. Thus, you can only rely on Frame Generation.

Sadly, RDR does not support AMD FSR 3.0 Frame Generation. This is a bummer as only those with an RTX40 will be able to somehow overcome the game’s CPU optimization issues. Everyone else will hit a CPU wall, especially when using older CPUs.

The good news here is that you will be able to use Lossless Scaling to enable Frame Generation. And, since the game has native support for NVIDIA Reflex, the input latency should be minimal. There might be some visual glitches but hey, at least there is a workaround for all those that don’t have an RTX40 GPU.

So there you have it. Red Dead Redemption Remastered is CPU-bound on PC, even when using high-end CPUs. Now don’t get me wrong. On a high-end CPU, the game will run fine. It’s not like it’s unplayable. No no no. The game ran great on our AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. I mean, we’re talking about 140FPS. I also didn’t notice any stutters. This is a great gaming experience. However, those with older CPUs may encounter performance issues. And that sucks.

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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