Red Dead Redemption 2 Best Steam Deck Settings

Red Dead Redemption 2 is the epic open-world Wild West adventure game that thrusts players into the rugged heartland of America during the late 1800s, offering a vast, immersive frontier to explore. Now, you can experience this incredible ride on the Steam Deck with the best settings, tried and tested to give you an immersive gaming experience on the go.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Best Steam Deck Settings

Compatibility Settings
Proton Version Experimental
BIOS Settings
UMA Frame Buffer Size 1G
CryoUtilities Settings
Swappiness Recommended
Swap File Size 16GB

For such an expansive and visually stunning game, Red Dead Redemption 2 runs surprisingly well on the Steam Deck. In fact, with our settings, you can get an experience that’s on par with the PlayStation 4 version of the game in a form factor that you can take on the road.

Red Dead Redemption 2 runs just fine with the default settings, but you can improve overall framerate stability by using CryoUtilities. I suggest letting the tool automatically change your system settings to the recommended ones, but the two things we’re most looking to change are Swap File Size and Swappiness.

How big should your Swap File be? It depends on the size of your internal hard disk. Those playing on a 64GB Steam Deck won’t have much flexibility here, as you’re already strapped for disk space, even without the added capacity of a larger Swap File.

One interesting quirk about Red Dead Redemption 2 is that, as far as experts in the community can tell, increasing the UMA Frame Buffer Size actually hurts overall performance in this game.

The UMA Frame Buffer determines how much of the system’s shared RAM is dedicated to the GPU. Most modern games are GPU-heavy and texture sizes have increased in recent years, so you generally want this setting to be as high as possible. However, a large UMA Frame Buffer can hurt performance in CPU-intensive games, as it limits how much RAM is dedicated to the CPU processes.

In short: use CryoUtilities to set the File Swap size as large as your system will allow. Then go into the BIOS and set your UMA Frame Buffer Size to 1G.

Done? Now that you’ve applied the necessary tweaks above, it’s time to start messing with the in-game settings for a silky smooth experience on the Steam Deck. Let’s jump right in!

Recommended — Quality Settings (Native@30fps | ~1h30m)

Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the better-looking games in recent years, even half a decade after it was originally released, and I think it’s best enjoyed with all the bells and whistles turned as high up as possible. These settings will give you an experience on par with the PlayStation 4 version of the game on the Steam Deck’s 7-inch screen. Of course, that does mean you’ll have to accept playing at 30 frames per second, but it’s worth it for the added immersion the enhanced visuals provide.

In-game Settings
Resolution 1280×800
Refresh Rate 60
Screen Type Fullscreen
VSync Off
Triple Buffering Off
Anti-Aliasing Low
Graphics Settings
Quality Preset Level Favor Performance
Texture Quality Ultra
Anisotropic Filtering X8
Lighting Quality High
Global Illumination Quality High
Shadow Quality High
Far Shadow Quality Medium
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion High
Reflection Quality Medium
Mirror Quality Medium
Water Quality Medium
Volumetrics Quality High
Particle Quality High
Tesselation Quality Medium
TAA High

Balanced Settings (Native@40fps | ~2h)

If 30 frames per second is just too low for you, these settings allow you to push the framerate up to 40 fps. To get there, we turn down the overall quality of the visuals by a notch (from mostly high to mostly medium/low), but the final settings do provide a noticeably smoother experience. Lowering the graphics settings also reduces the load on the Steam Deck’s APU, so you reap better playtime as well.

In-game Settings
Resolution 1280×800
Refresh Rate 60
Screen Type Fullscreen
VSync Off
Triple Buffering Off
Anti-Aliasing Low
Graphics Settings
Quality Preset Level Favor Performance
Texture Quality Medium
Anisotropic Filtering X2
Lighting Quality Medium
Global Illumination Quality Low
Shadow Quality Medium
Far Shadow Quality Low
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion Medium
Reflection Quality Low
Mirror Quality Low
Water Quality Low
Volumetrics Quality Medium
Particle Quality Medium
Tesselation Quality Low
TAA Low
Steam Deck Performance Menu Settings
Refresh Rate 40
Framerate Limit 40
Allow Tearing On
Half Rate Shading Off
Thermal Power (TDP) Limit Off
Manual GPU Clock Control Off
Scaling Filter Linear

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