GTX 980 in Red Dead Redemption at 1080p - All Settings

GTX 980 in Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p - All Settings

Intro

Welcome back to another article and in this one my friends I’m going to be testing the GTX 980 in Red Dead Redemption 2 and we're running the drivers for 471.12 which are the latest drivers from Nvidia and optimized supposedly for this game. This is the district's version by the way and it runs at 1329 Mega Hertz on the core here, it's factory overclocked of course and we are running it with the rise of i7 3700X and 16 gigs of RAM of course overkill specs for this GPU but you guys should be able to get pretty much the same FPS like 4th Gen  i7 or Ryzen 5 1400 overclocked stuff like that won't bottleneck our GTX 980. In this article, I will tell you the performance of GTX 980 in Red Dead Redemption 2.

We're going to be testing it at 1080p as you can see here at low medium-high and ultra settings starting with low settings of course 

I’m going to be using Ultra settings textures throughout this article because I feel like the quality increases so much and you only lose like 1 or 2  FPS. So, yeah that's perfectly justified to play at Ultra settings if you guys have a 4-gigabyte graphics card or even a 3-gigabyte graphics cards please set the texture quality to Ultra. it will make the game look a lot better and as you can see guys starting with low settings, of course, everything is turned down to its minimum including this one now.

1080p Low Settings

Let's get into it, so, here with the GTX 980 we're getting FPS on low settings in the 70s not too bad we were looking at this entire scene it looks beautiful by the way even on low settings of course ultra settings do help a ton with the visuals because if you put it on low it looks like a mess. Let's try to find a more dense forest area to test our minimum FPS, so, 60 FPS around here in the most intense area, not too bad by the way we're running Vulcan API instead of DirectX 12 because it makes the game perform just slightly better. 

GTX 980 in Red Dead Redemption at 1080p - All Settings

You know it, you get actually like 1 or 2 more FPS by using Vulcan instead of DirectX 12, but if you know if you guys prefer DirectX 12 just play with whatever. The FPS increase or the FPS difference isn't that noticeable and you guys should be getting the same experience with Vulcan or DirectX 12, so, guys as you can see here low settings run the game perfectly smoothly above 60 FPS pretty much at all times if it drops from 60 it will be to the High 50s and it probably won't be that noticeable to you.

 

I say this is a very good experience of course the game can and will look a lot better on Medium settings or high settings and I'd probably play on medium even if we get like 40 FPS. I think the trade-off between low and medium Graphical Fidelity wise is worth it completely worth it in my opinion. This game is a visual masterpiece at higher settings as you may know.

1080p Medium Settings

I think that's enough off low settings as I can tell you that it doesn't drop from 60 even in dense forest areas so that's very good to see of course and I’m going to go ahead restart the game and set everything to medium. Alright, guys, so we're playing now at 1080p medium settings as you can see here this preset is a little bit like below middle maybe around 33 40 per cent. So, yeah these are medium settings that I chose, this one is very demanding, so it's on low from what I've seen it gets a very big  FPS drop.

 

If you put it on like high settings, medium settings are okay it doesn't drop too much but yeah and as you can see everything almost everything is set to the medium settings and some things are on high of course some things are turned on or off and yeah we're going to go with the settings over here 50 FPS. This is similar performance what we got with, for example, the  GTX 1060 and the GTX 980 and the GTX 1060 are very similar performance-wise, that's the 6-gigabyte version of GTX 1060 because the 3-gigabyte version is closer to the GTX 970.

 

The game looks a lot better by the way because there're a ton of new effects introduced by medium settings that were turned off for its lowest and low settings, the Lightning looks a lot better reflection like in the puddles in the ground and the water, of course, looks a little bit better as well like pretty much everything is a little bit better and of course, those lighting effects and shadows are very good, everything looks a lot better at medium setting. 

GTX 980 in Red Dead Redemption at 1080p - All Settings

This is perfectly playable very smooth like around 50  FPS pretty much all of the time and yeah you could play like this and have a blast playing Red Dead Redemption 2 because the game does look very good here using these settings. 

I will have no problems whatsoever playing like this guys, this looks insanely good, a very good boost in visual fidelity coming from low settings, that's it at medium settings here down to the 40s sometimes in more foresty areas. 48 49 is not a bad performance at all this is very similar as I said already to the GTX 1066 6 Gigabytes. 

1080p High Settings

Let's just change our settings here, switch to high settings and we'll be back soon alright guys we're back at it again 1080p high settings right now, the collection qualities are set to medium and the lighting quality is set to high this time around that's because we chose the preset favoured quality which is I suppose are high settings. If you guys want to get a little bit better FPS without sacrificing set few settings too high manually while everything else is still pretty much at medium, high or ultra, mostly on high of course because these are high settings after all or at least I call it high settings and the game calls it high settings as well. 

We are getting like 30 FPS so far. I've been running around for 15 seconds or something like that and I haven't seen it drop from 30, so, that's pretty good like these quality visuals with 30 plus  FPS all of the time that's a really good experience. I’m not going to lie okay that's impressive as well because this game is gorgeous on high settings, we're in a dense forest area we aren't dropping from 30. That's pretty good guys, I can't seem to be able to drop this from 30 FPS at least, I couldn't do it so far. 30 FPS it's not dropping to 29, let's see if we can do a hit though.

 

GTX 980 in Red Dead Redemption at 1080p - All Settings

The water quality also looks really good if you have a controller or something and are willing to lock your FPS too, thoroughly it looks great and we haven't dropped from 30  FPS. I wasn't expecting the GTX 980 to pull so many FPS here on high settings I mean 30 FPS isn't too good you know but after seeing what GTX 1060 could do and knowing that the GTX 980 is from an earlier generation you know, so, DirectX 12 and Vulcan supports aren't that great on these older cards.

 

I was expecting it to fall a little bit behind the GTX 1060 at Higher settings, but now guys it's still hanging in there as you can see tons of leaves going on here tons of foliage with lots of shadows and stuff and we aren't seeing our  FPS dropping from 30 which is great. If you have a controller again this is like a console-like experience with way better graphics of course because I think the consoles run that's something like low or medium setting something between. It's not medium but yeah high settings here everything looks gorgeous guys and I recommend these settings if you guys have a GTX 980.

1080p Ultra Settings

 

We're going to be dropping from 30 FPS when using ultra quality settings, but so far guys I got to tell you, this is pretty good-looking and if you guys invested in a GTX 980 in 2014 you can still play this game and enjoy beautiful graphics and decent experience gameplay-wise. So, I’m going to go ahead now and put it at Ultra settings and just test that for a little bit because nobody should use Ultra settings with this game. 

I don't think that the quality increase is worth it over high settings as you'll be able to see it looks pretty much the same so yeah 1080p ultra settings now, some things are still on a medium like the reflection quality over here which we can't set to high because it consumes a lot of VRAM.

 

Everything else is on Ultra, these are pretty much the maxed-out settings that the game allows our GTX 980 to be set at, by the slider over here so let's apply that change in the motion blur because we don't like that and let's see how many FPS we can get here. So, 31 Oh my God! there's the 29 but still guys I was expecting a bigger drop in FPS than this I was expecting like 25 FPS coming out from the GTX 980 at Ultra settings but we're getting around 30  FPS with a few drops to the 25, 24 now.

 

GTX 980 in Red Dead Redemption at 1080p - All Settings

We're in the mid-20s now and maybe because of the water quality that's demanding as well if you go up into high or ultra settings in the water quality settings. This is still playable don't get me wrong but of course, the FPS are very bad compared to high settings because we were getting 30 plus  FPS all of the time. In fact with those settings now we're dropping into the high 20s and mid-20 sometimes and that's not a very good experience. I wouldn't play like this was just to see how well the GTX 980 could handle this game at Ultra settings and you know what guys this is impressive for me.

 

I wasn't expecting this, so, thank you so much for reading this article. I hope it was informative and helpful to you and I'll hopefully see you in the next one and as always I love you all guys bye-bye.