“Do a RDR2 Online video for the website? Sure, no worries — let’s record that later.”
Little did I know that casual sentence would mark the beginning of an epic quest to successfully load a game I had already played fifty hours of on my PC weeks previously. A journey of confusion, annoyance, incredible frustration, and — I’m happy to finally report — salvation.
This is the unwelcome tradition of getting Rockstar games to play properly on PC. A problem that a worrying number of players still face in 2026, six years after the game’s PC launch, with no sign of Rockstar particularly rushing to fix it.
The original version of this guide focused on the Rockstar Games Launcher crashes that plagued the 2019-2020 launch window. Those fixes are still here, because some of them still work. But the landscape has shifted considerably — the launcher issues have largely been resolved by updates, only to be replaced by a new generation of crashes centred on the ERR_GFX_STATE error, DirectX 12 instability, and the frankly baffling Parallax Occlusion Mapping bug that has been tormenting RTX 4000 and 5000 series owners throughout 2025 and into 2026.
Work through these in order. Most people find their fix somewhere between steps 3 and 8.
Step 1: Try Rockstar’s Official Support Pages
Step 1: Try Rockstar’s Official Support Pages
Rockstar’s official support exists and occasionally contains useful information. Their standard troubleshooting covers the basics: verify game files, update the launcher, check system requirements. It is, as it has always been, somewhat lame in its ambition — but it costs nothing to check whether your specific error code has an official acknowledgement before descending into the community rabbit hole.
If you’re getting a specific error code, search it on the support pages first. ERR_GFX_STATE in particular has a Rockstar acknowledgement page, though the suggested fix there may not be the most effective one. See Step 7.
Step 2: Verify Game File Integrity
Before anything else, make sure the game itself isn’t corrupted.
On Steam: Right-click Red Dead Redemption 2 in your library → Properties → Installed Files → Verify integrity of game files.
On Rockstar Launcher: Click the Settings cog next to RDR2 → Verify Integrity.
On Epic: Right-click the game → Manage → Verify.
This catches corrupted files from failed updates, interrupted downloads, or overzealous antivirus software silently quarantining game files. Takes five minutes and has saved many players from hours of further troubleshooting. Do it first.
Step 3: Clean Install Your GPU Drivers
Not update — clean install. There’s an important difference and it matters more for RDR2 than for most games.
A normal driver update leaves behind configuration files from previous versions that can conflict with the new installation. RDR2’s graphics system is complex enough that these remnants cause crashes that look completely unrelated to drivers.
The correct process:
- Download Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) — free, widely trusted
- Boot Windows into Safe Mode (Settings → Recovery → Advanced Startup → Troubleshoot → Advanced Options → Startup Settings → Restart → press 4)
- Run DDU and select “Clean and restart”
- After reboot, install the latest driver directly from NVIDIA or AMD — not via GeForce Experience or the Windows update catalogue
This single step has fixed crashing for a significant number of players who had already tried “updating” their drivers and seen no improvement.
Step 4: The ERR_GFX_STATE Fix — Parallax Occlusion Mapping
This is the dominant crash affecting players in 2025-2026, particularly on RTX 4000 and 5000 series GPUs, and the fix is almost offensively simple once you know it.
The ERR_GFX_STATE error causes the game to crash either immediately on loading into the open world, or within a few minutes of play. If this is your symptom, do the following:
Quick fix:
- Launch the game and go to Settings → Graphics
- Find Parallax Occlusion Mapping and set it to Low or Off
- Leave everything else at whatever settings you prefer
That’s it. Players with RTX 5080s running everything else maxed at 4K are playing crash-free with just this one setting reduced. It appears to be a driver-level conflict between Rockstar’s implementation of POM and NVIDIA’s recent driver architecture. Whether Rockstar will ever patch it is an open question; the workaround is reliable.
If you want to keep POM at higher settings, there’s a more involved workaround:
- Navigate to Documents → Rockstar Games → Red Dead Redemption 2 → Settings
- Open system.xml in Notepad
- Find the line
<API>kSettingAPI_DX12</API>and change DX12 to Vulkan - Save the file
- Launch the game, set your graphics including POM to whatever you want, then switch the API back to DirectX 12 in the graphics settings before loading into the open world
- Repeat this process each time you launch
It’s a pain. The simpler fix is just turning POM down.
Step 5: Switch Between DirectX 12 and Vulkan
Separate from the POM issue, the choice of graphics API is the single most common variable in RDR2 crashes generally. If you’re crashing and you’re on DX12, try Vulkan. If you’re on Vulkan, try DX12.
To switch:
- Settings → Graphics → Advanced Settings → Graphics API
DX12 generally offers better performance on modern NVIDIA hardware. Vulkan tends to be more stable on AMD hardware and on older NVIDIA cards. Neither is universally superior — your specific hardware and driver combination determines which behaves better. Try both and note whether the crashes change.
Step 6: Add RDR2 to Your Antivirus Exclusion List
Windows Security and third-party antivirus software frequently interfere with RDR2 — not because the game is suspicious, but because its launcher behaviour and file access patterns resemble things that real-time protection is designed to flag.
Add the following folders to your exclusion list:
- Your RDR2 installation folder (usually
C:\Program Files\Rockstar Games\Red Dead Redemption 2) Documents\Rockstar Games\Red Dead Redemption 2- The Rockstar Games Launcher installation folder
In Windows Security: Virus & Threat Protection → Manage Settings → Add or Remove Exclusions.
Disable real-time protection entirely as a test first — if the game suddenly runs without issue, you’ve confirmed antivirus is the problem and can then add the exclusions properly rather than leaving protection off permanently.
Step 7: Reset the Game’s Settings Files
Sometimes the settings files in your Documents folder become corrupted — particularly after a driver update or a crash that occurred mid-save. The game reads these on launch and if they’re malformed, it crashes before you reach the main menu.
- Navigate to
Documents\Rockstar Games\Red Dead Redemption 2\Settings - Delete everything inside that folder (your save games are stored separately in the Profiles folder and will not be affected)
- Launch the game — it will generate fresh default settings files
Also worth doing: right-click on RDR2.exe → Properties → Compatibility tab → tick Disable fullscreen optimizations. This is a Windows-level setting that causes performance and stability issues with several games that predate Windows 11’s fullscreen handling.
Step 8: Disable All Overlays
Discord, NVIDIA GeForce Experience, Steam, MSI Afterburner, AMD Adrenalin — any application running an overlay while RDR2 is active is a potential crash source. The game’s anti-tamper systems are not good at distinguishing between a monitoring overlay and something it should actually be concerned about.
Turn off every overlay before launching:
- Discord: Settings → Activity Settings → toggle off overlay
- GeForce Experience: Settings → General → toggle off In-Game Overlay
- Steam: Steam → Settings → In-Game → uncheck Enable the Steam Overlay
- MSI Afterburner: Settings → On-Screen Display → set hotkeys to None and close the application
- AMD Adrenalin: Performance → Metrics → toggle off overlay
If you use a controller via Steam, also go into Big Picture Mode → Settings → Controller and uncheck the configuration options for your specific controller type. Steam’s controller handling can interfere with RDR2’s own input detection.
Step 9: Check the Windows Event Viewer
If the game is crashing silently with no error code, the Event Viewer often knows more than Rockstar is telling you.
- Press Win + R, type
eventvwr.msc, press Enter - Navigate to Windows Logs → Application
- Look for Critical or Error entries timed around when your crash occurred
- The description will contain file paths indicating which component failed
Common culprits identified this way include specific DLL files, audio driver conflicts, and memory errors. If you see amdvlk64.dll in the error description and you’re on NVIDIA hardware, rename that file — navigate to C:\Windows\System32, find amdvlk64.dll, and rename it to amdvlk64.dll.bak. This AMD Vulkan driver file occasionally gets installed by other applications and conflicts with NVIDIA’s own Vulkan implementation.
Step 10: Delete the Rockstar Games Folder from OneDrive
If you use OneDrive with folder backup enabled, there is a well-documented conflict where OneDrive attempts to sync Rockstar’s save and settings files while the game is running. This causes file access conflicts that produce crashes with no clear error message.
- Open OneDrive settings
- Go to Backup → Manage Backup
- Disable backup for the Documents folder, or navigate to your OneDrive Documents folder and remove the Rockstar Games subfolder from sync
Alternatively, move your Documents folder out of OneDrive’s sync scope entirely. This is a broader fix for several games that have issues with cloud-synced Documents folders.
Step 11: Delete C++ Runtime Files and Reinstall
RDR2 ships with its own Visual C++ redistributable packages. If these conflict with versions already installed on your system, the result is crashes that look completely unrelated to C++ because nothing in the error message mentions it.
- Open Control Panel → Programs → Programs and Features
- Sort by publisher and look for all Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable entries
- Uninstall all of them
- Restart Windows
- Navigate to your RDR2 installation folder →
_CommonRedist\vcredist - Install each package in that folder
- Also download and install the latest Visual C++ redistributables directly from Microsoft’s website
Step 12: Move the Game Off the Rockstar Launcher
This remains as valid in 2026 as it was in 2020. If you purchased RDR2 through the Rockstar Launcher and it continues to crash, buying it on Steam or Epic (which frequently runs it at significant discounts) and reinstalling there eliminates the Rockstar Launcher from the equation entirely.
Steam in particular handles RDR2 more reliably than the Rockstar Launcher for most users, and Steam’s verify integrity function is faster and more thorough than Rockstar’s equivalent. If you’ve exhausted every other option and still can’t get the Rockstar Launcher version to work, this is not a counsel of despair — it’s a practical solution that has worked for thousands of players.
Step 13: Update BIOS and Chipset Drivers
Unglamorous but occasionally the actual answer. If you’ve built or upgraded your PC in the last two years and haven’t updated your BIOS, do it. RDR2’s memory management is demanding enough that BIOS-level memory compatibility issues — particularly with DDR5 on newer Intel and AMD platforms — produce intermittent crashes that no amount of in-game tweaking will fix.
Similarly, download the latest chipset drivers directly from your motherboard manufacturer’s website rather than relying on Windows Update. For AMD Ryzen systems particularly, chipset driver updates have historically included stability improvements relevant to memory-intensive games.
Step 14: If You’re Using Mods — Check Lenny’s Mod Loader
New to this guide for 2026: if you’re running mods via Lenny’s Mod Loader, load order conflicts between mods are now one of the leading causes of RDR2 crashes reported on Steam and Reddit.
If you use mods and the game is crashing:
- Temporarily rename your
lmlfolder to disable all mods and test vanilla stability - If the game runs clean, re-enable mods one at a time to identify the conflict
- Check the LML load order — later-loading mods override earlier ones, and conflicts between mods that modify the same game files will crash the game
The RDR2 modding community is active and well-documented. The Nexus Mods RDR2 page and the dedicated subreddit are good sources for mod-specific crash solutions.
The Moral of the Tale
Red Dead Redemption 2 is, by any reasonable measure, one of the finest games ever made. It is also, by any reasonable measure, a game that Rockstar has never properly maintained on PC. In six years the launcher has improved, the worst launch-window crashes have been patched, and the game has become available on Steam and Epic — all good. But the underlying fragility of the PC version, its sensitivity to driver versions, its inexplicable interactions with Windows settings, and the ongoing ERR_GFX_STATE debacle with modern NVIDIA hardware suggest a codebase that nobody at Rockstar is actively tending.
The good news is that the community has, as it always does, filled the gap. The fixes above represent the collective troubleshooting of thousands of players who refused to accept that a fifty-quid game shouldn’t work. Work through them methodically and the odds are excellent that somewhere in this list is your salvation.
Arthur Morgan survived Blackwater. You can survive this.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is available on Steam, Epic Games Store, and the Rockstar Games Launcher. Image credit: Rockstar Games.
Last updated: March 2026
