Red Dead Redemption 2’s next-gen glow-up is finally here, sort of

Red Dead Redemption 2 is still locked at 30 FPS on consoles. Seven years on, no official next-gen upgrade, no 60fps, nothing. Rockstar Games has said nothing about fixing it.

So players went and found their own workaround.

The game gets called a modern-day masterpiece, one of the greatest ever made, Rockstar’s magnum opus. All of that holds up. (At least until Grand Theft Auto VI lands later this year and everyone recalibrates.) But the frame rate thing sits there like a splinter, and fans have been waiting on a fix that hasn’t come.

What DLSS 5.0 actually does to the frame

Nvidia’s DLSS 5.0 “is a neural rendering model that takes the game’s color and motion vectors as input for each frame, then infuses the scene with photoreal lighting and materials that are anchored to the source 3D content and temporally consistent from frame-to-frame.”

Translation: it rebuilds how a scene is lit, using AI, on the fly.

Since the announcement, comparison videos for a pile of well-loved games have flooded the internet, and the reception has been split. The complaints mostly land on the same spot: the AI and generative AI baked into the model give results that “uncanny” quality plenty of us clock instantly in AI-enhanced footage.

Someone finally pointed it at Arthur’s world

YouTuber Ruaninho BR put together a four-minute video showing what Red Dead Redemption 2 looks like running with the tech, and it’s the closest thing to an answer anyone’s had.

He walks around the in-game camp, photographing camp members and adjusting settings to demonstrate the range of what the software can pull off. The tweaks are visible. The graphics improve, and photo mode in particular takes a real leap.

It isn’t an unofficial next-gen update. For anyone willing to run the software, though, it’s the next best thing available right now.

The best compliment in the comments is a backhanded one

Not everyone came away convinced the upgrade was necessary. As one comment read, “Rockstar is so awesome that you don’t see that much of a difference with DLSS 5.”

Which is a strange kind of praise, and also the truest thing anyone’s said about this. The 2018 game holds its own against a 2026 neural renderer.

DLSS 5.0 remains controversial as of this writing. That won’t stop developers from folding it into their projects going forward.

And Red Dead Redemption 2 keeps doing what it’s done since launch: looking iconic and graphically stunning entirely on its own, at 30 frames per second, waiting.