Red Dead Redemption 2 has finally made its way to PC this week and while it is visually impressive, a lot of early players have run into bugs and issues at launch. To help fix some of this, Rockstar has issued an update for the Rockstar Games Launcher, which was causing a number of crashes and failures to load. There are some other fixes floating around too for those encountering stuttering, freezing or other in-game crashes. 

Starting things off, if you have had an error where the Rockstar Games Launcher “failed to initialize” on startup or crashed, preload decryption failed, or an error asking you to verify your game files, then make sure you install the latest Rockstar Games Launcher update. The latest update addresses these issues when launching the game directly through Rockstar's launcher as well as launching through the Epic Games Store.

Other common causes for crashes include out of date GPU drivers, so be sure to install the new updates pushed out by both Nvidia and AMD earlier this week. Anti-virus software may also be interfering with the game at points and causing crashes, so double check your anti-virus software and make sure exceptions are in place for Red Dead Redemption 2, or disable it entirely while playing and see if that helps.

Stuttering and freezing issues in-game are a little more complicated. One Redditor claims that disabling two-cores on a quad-core CPU via the task manager can help smooth out performance, although judging by the feedback, this isn't a fix that works for everyone. Before trying that, we would suggest testing the DIrectX 12 API in the advanced graphics options menu, as while the average frame rate is lower than the game running on Vulkan, frame pacing appears to be smoother, which should fix stuttering. Beyond that, perhaps try different combinations of FreeSync, G-Sync and V-Sync, or enable a frame rate cap to try and smooth things over.

Rockstar will be patching Red Dead Redemption 2 in the weeks to come, so hopefully these user-side fixes won't be necessary for very long. We'll keep an eye out for more updates from Rockstar has bug fixes get underway.

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KitGuru Says: Have many of you started playing Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC this week? Have you encountered bugs or performance issues so far? 

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