Rockstar blames old drivers for Red Dead 2’s rough launch

Red Dead Redemption 2 is officially out on PC (except Steam). It should be an exciting day for the many gamers who waited patiently in the year since its console launch. Many gamers, however, are having issues even launching Red Dead Redemption 2.

Of course, you should update your drivers. Nvidia and AMD have both released updated drivers for the release of Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar is attributing game crashes to those out of date graphics drivers and suggesting that players run the game as a Windows Administrator to get it going. But that's far from the only issue.

Many users can't even launch the game, and the PCRedDead subreddit has turned the error into somewhat of a meme. Rockstar has its own launcher now, and many eager gamers are finding out that the launcher won't launch. Players on the subreddit are finding solutions like disabling their anti-virus, switching audio outputs, updating their BIOS, and disabling CPU cores. Of course, these solutions are self-reported, so it's hard to tell which ones are actually fixing the issue and which are just accompanying the fix.

Other players are able to start the game, but seeing frequent dips in framerate on settings that should be well within spec for the hardware they're playing on.

Rockstar has released a fix for the launcher issue, and it seems likely that other fixes are coming along shortly. In the meantime, though, it seems that while Red Dead Redemption 2 is ready to download, you may have to wait a while to play it. Big games are complex pieces of software, and a game as popular as Red Dead 2 has the added benefit of having many more users than even other popular games poking and prodding it all at the same time, exposing problems more quickly than they might be. That doesn't excuse things like the launcher issue, of course.

Anyone with even a modicum of experience playing PC games is used to the occasional headache. Accounting for the millions of hardware and software configurations that people might run your game on isn't easy. But this seems especially egregious even if we accept that PC games take more configuration than their console counterparts. Some games see quick turnarounds, and we're hoping to see that from Red Dead Redemption 2. We're hoping we're not in for another Batman: Arkham Knight.

The post Rockstar blames old drivers for Red Dead 2's rough launch appeared first on The Tech Report.