For those of you hoping that the creator of the recent GTA V VR mod might be able to work some magic on the recently-released Red Dead Redemption 2 PC port, don’t hold your breath. For a multitude of technical reasons, the game won’t be modded for VR in the same fashion as the recent GTA V VR mod anytime soon.
Luke Ross, the creator of the recently-released GTA V VR mod, responded to a Reddit thread asking about whether RDR2 might get the same VR treatment now that it has been released on PC. He shut down the idea pretty fast.
Ross wrote that he finished some benchmarking sessions with RDR2 and “the news is not good”.
The way that the GTA V VR mod works is by using alternate eye rendering – meaning that frames are split alternatively between each eye for VR. If the mod were running at 60 frames per second, the game would alternate rendering a frame for each eye, resulting in, effectively, 30 frames per eye. He wrote that RDR2 on the default settings “struggles to reach 40 fps on a system with i9-9900K, 32 GB dual channel, GTX 1080 Ti, and of course SSD.” Because of alternate eye rendering, that means effectively 20 frames per eye. Ross suggested “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.”
“Please don’t take this to mean that the game is not “optimized” as kids on the forums love to say,” wrote Ross. “At 1080p, it pushes more than 80 fps (in other terms more than needed) while looking gorgeous.”
There are also other technical hurdles that a RDR2 VR mod would hypothetically face during development, but it looks like the biggest problem is that modern hardware can’t push the game at a high enough resolution and frame rate to make it comfortable.
Were you holding out for a RDR2 VR mod? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
