What’s the Red Dead 2 installation process and setup times like on PC day one

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Happy Red Dead Redemption 2 day!

Its Red Dead Redemption 2 release day on PC and if you are wondering how easy it will be to get the game up and running, run the Rockstar client and get your game up and running when you get back from work or school then here is a few bits of information about the install process to help you mentally prepare.

If you havent done already you need to download the game files. Many of us would have pre-installed it. The Red Dead 2 pre-install size was 109GB but it will definitely want you to have a bunch of extra GBs room on your specified hard-drive, so it can decrypt the game files ready for playing.

Red Dead Redemption’s installer client asked us to ensure we had an extra 3GB free after the pre-load was completed, space needed to swap about the game files during decryption process. Despite having done that, freeing up 3.2GB, our desktop still slowed to a crawl during the decryption stage because Windows 10 was crap about accurately informing us on how much space we had allocated and freed up.

Decryption of the 109GB game files on a Intel Core i7-5820K 6-Core 3.3GHz using SSD storage and 16GB of RAM took 17 minutes and 45 seconds.

As soon as the decryption got to the 109GB it then changed the total amount to 112.5GB and carried on decrypting up to that amount. Which took another 2 minutes. So it would seem, at first glance that there is a 3GB day one patch to install as well.

After that the installer then installed the DirectX prerequisites and Vulkan Runtime Instlaller which took our decryption and final day one install time up to 20 minutes and 12 seconds.

Remember this is assuming you have already pre-installed the 109GB game files ahead of day one RDR2 launch day.

After that you press play game and Red Dead 2 will ask you if you want to enable Cloud Saves, in case you want to access your save games across multiple machines.

Also prepare for the day 1 Nvidia and AMD drivers patch. Nvidia’s day 1 RDR2 driver is around 0.5GB to download as well.

If anything else happens that needs to be considered when installing and setting up your copy of Red Dead 2 on your first play through we will let you know otherwise take a look at the following articles that can help you better understand how Red Dead 2 will run on your PC.

* First Red Dead Redemption 2 PC benchmarks, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti struggles at 4K

* How long would it take you to download Red Dead Redemption 2

* Does Red Dead Redemption 2 have GeForce RTX real-time ray tracing support?

* Up For Debate – Are you upgrading your GPU for Red Dead Redemption 2?

Our Favorite Comments

“So for anyone having issues with it not launching, this solution helped me using bitdefender. https://i.imgur.com/1B71bWV.png. Other AVs will probably have a different name for it but seems to be the issue with a lot of games having problems with most anti-virus.”

bluej511 –