Red Dead Redemption On PS4 And PS5 Is A "Bare-Bones" Upgrade According To Technical Analysis

Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar's 2010 cowboy adventure, is now available on PlayStation consoles--and Nintendo Switch--but how does it measure up to the Xbox backward-compatible versions? On Xbox Series X and Xbox One X, Red Dead Redemption has a 4K presentation--1440p on Xbox Series S--and on PS5 and PS4, several key improvements are evident according to the game analysts at Digital Foundry.

While a small list of enhancements are noticeable, Digital Foundry noted that much more could have been done to improve the 13-year-old game. As the group explained, the Xbox backward-compatible version of Red Dead Redemption is the Xbox 360 edition of the game with a higher resolution, anisotropic filtering, and a negative LOD bias that enhances specific textures.

While the PS4 Pro version--which is used for the PS5 version--does have better shadows in comparison and a slightly different gamma presentation, the rest of the game "looks much the same" between the two consoles, according to Digital Foundry. "Models still have a sharp, slightly blocky character, with seventh-gen polygon budgets," Digital Foundry's Oliver Mackenzie explained. "I couldn't make out any improvement in textures either, and the game still suffers from some very low-res artwork. This includes the main character, whose muddy face should have been a high priority to improve. LODs look about the same between the two releases, with grass extending far into the distance on both machines, but with some noticeable pop-in at times as well."

Another point noted in the analysis is that Red Dead Redemption's user interface hasn't been updated for modern displays, resulting in 720p elements that haven't scaled well to 4K TVs when played on PS5 and PS4 Pro. On last-gen PlayStations, the PS4 Pro version is the same as the PS5 version, and the base PS4 version is rendered at a native 1080p, looks sharp, and has more aliasing in comparison.

"Red Dead Redemption is still a great-looking game in a lot of respects," Digital Foundry said in its conclusion. "Its wide-open plains and beautiful lighting looked very impressive at the time of release and still hold up reasonably well in 2023. It's the kind of game that doesn't really need a major overhaul to work well on modern systems--but even so this is a very barebones effort."