RDR2 VR may remain a dream on PC, even with the dedicated modding community of Rockstar fans. That's what Luke Ross, creator of the Grand Theft Auto V VR R.E.A.L. mod, wrote in a Reddit post a few days ago.
According to him, an RDR2 VR mod won't be possible any time soon simply due to the lack of the necessary horsepower on PC, at least for the time being.
[...] I just finished a few benchmarking sessions with RDR2, and the news is not good. With Balanced (default) settings, at the resolution and FOV needed for "real" VR, Red Dead Redemption 2 struggles to reach 40 fps on a system with i9-9900K, 32 GB dual channel, GTX 1080 Ti, and of course SSD.
To be clear, that's less than 40 total frames per second, or less than 20 per eye, even with alternate eye rendering.
With Performance settings, i.e, basically everything on Low, it runs at around 60-70 total fps (30-35 per eye, still not enough), and it looks like... well, you can imagine.
Please don't take this to mean that the game is not "optimized" as kids on the forums love to say. At 1080p, it pushes more than 80 fps (in other terms more than needed) while looking gorgeous. But there is no way that during 2020 a new GPU will come out that will be able to render RDR2 at the combination of quality, resolution, FOV and frame rate that is needed for proper VR. With SLI completely dead and no longer supported by either games or VR runtimes, there is not even the possibility to throw heaps of money at the problem.
Additionally, my GTA V mod was built around 3Dmigoto, which is limited to DX11, whereas RDR2 surprisingly came out supporting only DX12 and Vulkan. Unless 3Dmigoto is extended to DX12 (extremely unlikely), or RDR2 is backported to DX11 (yeah, sure), the mod would need to be rewritten from scratch, together with a new hooking library.
TL;DR: Don't hold your breath for a proper RDR2 VR mod that displays it in its full glory, the software and most importantly the hardware is just not there.
It is true that Red Dead Redemption 2, while looking stunning, is also very demanding on any PC system as our Keith put it. VR, due to its very nature, would basically require double the performance.
That said, we'll definitely let you know if an RDR2 VR mod is indeed released at some point in the future.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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