Just installed this again after picking up a new graphics card, are there any do's and don'ts I should know about with the graphics settings? Tree Tesselation I hear needs to be off
There's a couple of big performance hogs you have to be aware of. Tree tessellation you know about. The most important is Water Physics, it should be at the half way mark on the slider. Besides MSAA this is the biggest performance hit and generally the quality of the water physics don't visually improve much, so it's not warranted except for when we'll have too much power years from now. Another big performance hit will be from reflection quality - high is the sweetspot for when it looks good but doesn't cost too much, though I'll often run with even medium. Shadow Quality from Ultra to High can see a substantial performance saving as well. The visual difference isn't big at all but it's more worthwhile to keep when also having lighting on ultra as well (though that means further performance loss). Speaking of lighting quality, I stick with ultra no matter what because it is imo the most distinguishing feature of RDR2 graphics and it looks unbelievable at night, especially in St Denis - be warned, it does cost a lot, around 40% performance in the most taxing scenes. Good thing about it though is that even if you keep it on it doesn't hit performance during day time. Lastly, we come to volumetrics, the tri-fecta (near, far, quality). Here the sweet spot is (in order as they appear in menu): low/medium/high. It's mostly important to keep Volumetric Quality on high as that gives it more volume and it fills the screen better. If you put the other 2 too high then you'll see significant performance drops for not much visual improvement. Also, I'd say about TAA - try medium if you want more sharpness to the image, as High tends to be very soft & for 1440p that might be too much.
Everything else can pretty much go to ultra (except water refraction, it should also be medium). Make sure to test performance with vsync off first, so that you can then tailor your vsync choice based on numbers you know and that aren't hamstrung.
