Red Dead Redemption 2 has arrived on PC after a year-long wait, although it probably hasn't gone as smoothly as Rockstar was hoping. A ton of people are struggling to run RDR2 at all, while those that have managed to are finding the suggested system requirements may have been a little misleading.

Using our amassed benchmark data, we've put together a guide to help indicate what sort of performance you can expect while playing Red Dead Redemption 2, depending on your graphics card. There are external variables such as CPU to account for, but these benchmark results are assuming the graphics card is the bottleneck.

RDR2 benchmarks are available for 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions across a complete range of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia's previous three graphics card generations. These are average frame rate scores pulled from a mixture of High and Ultra graphics settings. We'd normally opt for purely Ultra but Red Dead Redemption 2 is undoubtedly one for the future and the frame rate absolutely tanks when all the graphics sliders are turned to the max.

Anyway, on the benchmark charts for Red Dead 2 below, there are two red vertical lines for each bar that indicate 30 frames per second and 60 frames per second respectively. If a graphics card scores below 30fps in a benchmark it’ll be red, if it’s between 30 and 60 it’s yellow, and anything 60 frames per second or higher is green. This provides an at-a-glance snapshot of the sort of performance you can expect from each of these graphics cards while running Red Dead Redemption 2 at the equivalent of High/Ultra settings.

All of this data is also viewable on Red Dead Redemption 2's game page, as well as on an array of other AAA PC titles. You can also head to the page of just about any graphics card from the past three generations and see plenty of extensive in-game benchmarks, such as the GeForce RTX 2060 Super. 

Last but not least, you can also pit two cards head-to-head to compare their gaming performance directly, such as the GeForce RTX 2070 versus the AMD Radeon RX 5700.

Red Dead Redemption 2 1080p Ultra Graphics Card Benchmarks (Average FPS)

Click to enlarge

We'll kindly call this 'disappointing'. The recommended graphics cards for Red Dead Redemption 2 are a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or a Radeon RX 480. If you plan to play at 1080p/High, neither of these graphics cards are getting near 60 frames per second. 1080p/30fps seems a reasonable assumption for those two video cards, although we'd argue that hardly constitutes recommended, but that's a debate for another time.

It all adds to the general air that Red Dead Redemption 2 is a mightily demanding game. Even some really top-end graphics cards are beginning to struggle on High, and during pure Ultra tests nearly all of them dip below 60 frames per second.

Red Dead Redemption 2 1440p Ultra Graphics Card Benchmarks (Average FPS)

Click to enlarge

And we have a similar tale for 1440p resolution, which is really the domain of AMD Radeon Vega and RX 5700 series, and the GeForce RTX 20 Series. Most other video cards are getting blowing out of the water here, although the ever-reliable GeForce GTX 1080 Ti is still going strong. 

What it does serve to highlight though is AMD's Radeon RX 5700 series is really punching above its weight. We've known for a while now that AMD was better prepared to Vulkan thanks to Mantle, and it would appear to be paying off here. The base Radeon RX 5700 is beating out the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, while the Radeon RX 5700 XT is averaging a frame rate higher than the GeForce RTX 2070 Super. It's not bad going at all from an AMD perspective.

Red Dead Redemption 2 4K Ultra Graphics Card Benchmarks (Average FPS)

Click to enlarge

So we hope you enjoy exploring this new GPU FPS data and as ever we’re really keen to hear if you’ve got any great suggestions for new features. You can find plenty more of these performance comparisons across game and graphics card pages.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Low vs Ultra Graphics Comparison

Red Dead Redemption 2 PC Performance Report - Graphics card benchmarks

Red Dead Redemption 2 Most Important Graphics Options - Every Setting Benchmarked