Red Dead Redemption 2 Found To Tie Mechanics to Framerates

After having to wait around 4-5 days for Rockstar Games to actually fix the game, I was finally able to start playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on my PC. So, how am I finding it? Well, I must say that so far I’ve been enjoying it thoroughly.

Admittedly, this is perhaps partly due to the fact that having already played it on the PS4. As such, I’ve already made all the basic mistakes before (such as leaping off a cliff and killing my horse). I’m, therefore, not repeating them this time around. Well, not quite as often anyway.

While the PC port still isn’t perfect (and still has a few fixes that would help significantly) a Reddit user has seemingly discovered a yet unconfirmed issue. Namely, that the framerate you run the game can have a significant bearing on keeping Arthur Morgan alive and well.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Frame Rate Issue

It’s well known (particularly in games developed by Bethesda) that often the framerate of a game can have weird implications on how it runs. Sticking with the Bethesda theme, for example, the framerate is often directly tied into the physics engine. This means that you can sometimes suffer and sometimes benefit from this.

So, what’s the deal with Red Dead Redemption 2? Well, Reddit user “jimmyoneshot” has discovered that if you run the game at a higher framerate, keeping your cores full may become a tougher problem.

Reddit Post

“I noticed that right from the start of Chapter 2 when the weight mechanic actually starts being applied that no matter what I ate Arthur always seemed to be losing weight at a fast rate. And that his cores were also draining at a very fast rate too. I noticed that both of these seemed to be specifically going down 4 times as fast as on my PS4. After a shitload of testing, this got me thinking. What could be 4 times as fast on PC as on the PS4? Then I noticed my FPS counter in the top left that I was using and it was about 120 fps. 4 times the fps that consoles are limited to.

So I did an experiment. I made a save game at the very start of Chapter 2 and then proceeded to replay the same day twice in the exact same way, doing 2 missions and eating 4 steaks at the exact same times on each day except on one day I used my usual fps of 100 – 130 and on the 2nd day I limited it to 30fps, the same as consoles

It seems that the problem is the game classes frames as actual units of time passing so at a high fps of 120 the code treats 1 day as technically 4 days long. Even if you limit your fps to a steady 60 Arthur will need to eat twice as much as he would on consoles to not become massively underweight.”

What Does This Mean?

I must confess that having played the game for a fair while now, I had noticed that my character did seem to need to eat a lot more often than when I played it on the PS4. In addition, my ‘cores’ were needing far more maintenance than I remembered. I hadn’t, however, paid this much mind and certainly didn’t consider that my framerate would play a role in this.

So, what can you do if this is a problem for you? Well, the simple version seems to be locking the game to 30FPS. Yes, it might not look as pretty, but you’ll keep your cores up a lot easier. The alternative is that Rockstar Games can fix it. That, however, may be trickier than it sounds depending on how integrated this is.

The bottom line, however, is that if you’re running this in the hundreds of frames per second, you’re going to have a much tougher time keeping Arthur happy! Oh, don’t forget your horse too!

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!