Red Dead Redemption 2 has received a hefty update for the PC version which cures a bunch of problematic crashes and issues, including the ‘unexpected exit’ blues affecting some gamers, and stuttering issues (superseding the previous workaround fix for this which wasn’t ideal).
As we observed last week, said workaround was rather clunky – involving adding a launch parameter – and Rockstar warned that with some PC configurations, it could potentially cause a little slowdown in towns.
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Obviously that wasn’t ideal in both those respects, but now Rockstar says in the latest patch notes that the following has been implemented: “Improvements to address an issue that resulted in stalls on 4-core and 6-core CPUs.”
Yes, the ‘stuttering’ was so bad for some folks, it was effectively stalling the frame rate and freezing for several seconds at a time, making RDR2 a true slideshow.
Note that if you’re running an Nvidia graphics card with your 4-core or 6-core processor, you also need to apply the GeForce Hotfix Driver Version 441.34. Grab that direct from Nvidia here (interestingly, the GPU maker notes it’s a fix for stalling under Vulkan, so make of that what you will – as far as we’re aware, this wasn’t a Vulkan-specific issue).
Finally, after applying that Nvidia hotfix, make sure you remove that launch parameter if you used the aforementioned workaround. Then you should be good to go with no stuttering or stalling antics to spoil your fun (keep your fingers crossed, anyway).
No exit
This isn’t the only major move with this large patch, which also introduces fixes for various different crashes, including the big ‘Red Dead Redemption 2 exited unexpectedly’ problem which has been bugging many players.
So hopefully – again fingers crossed – we’ve seen the back of that.
Another big bugbear has apparently been resolved whereby those running at high frame rates could see Arthur’s cores drain faster than intended when playing Story Mode, and the player’s weight again decreasing faster than intended in Red Dead Online.
So those who are running the game at impressive frame rates should no longer encounter these perplexing issues. As PC Gamer reports, this was seemingly related to the passage of time in the game being speeded up in general for these users (so weather was changing faster, and the day/night cycle). So rejoice, if you're planning on stacking wagons in your free time with Red Dead Redemption 2 cheats.
All in all, there are a raft of major improvements here, for sure, and the icing on the cake is a tweak to mean that your customized graphics settings will no longer revert to the low preset after a patch has been applied. Of course, they will still do so with this patch, but going forward, you should no longer be troubled by having to reapply all your visual settings post-patching…
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