Red Dead Redemption 2

I played this 2018 game with a “GeForce RTX 2080 Ti” and was able to run almost every graphic setting on “Ultra” and maintain 60 fps at 2560x1440. Here are the ones I had to turn down:

Water Physics

80%

MSAA

Off. This one nuked performance for me.

Soft Shadows

High

Grass Shadows

High

Parallax Occlusion Quality

High

Tree Tesselation

Off. Looks pretty rad, but this game is lousy with trees.

Like most games run via Wine, it can be pretty tough to track down game files. Here are some that I found:

• Every 10-15 hours of play, the game would simply freeze. I would need to switch back to Steam (or htop) and kill the process. This was rare enough not to bother me too much, but it did sometimes require me to replay the last 15 minutes of some mission.
• There was exactly one mission that would crash every single time for me: Country Pursuits. After 3-4 attempts, I decided to try lowering the graphic settings to medium. With that, I was able to beat the mission. Afterwards, I set the graphics back to “almost-Ultra” and it was fine from then on.
• This isn’t really a bug, but. I have hotkeys which jump the mouse cursor to my various screens. This is particularly useful for games that like to capture the mouse. However, when it loses focus, RDR2 remembers what modifier keys you had depressed. After pressing WIN+CTRL+2 to switch to my second monitor, upon returning to the game, CTRL would be “held-down” until I pressed it again.

Fortunately, Reddit user “Elgghinnarisa” points out that if you rename these files with a .jpg extension, some apps can open them. This almost certainly means that these files are actual JPEG images, embedded in some kind of container along with Rockstar-metadata! If we write a script to find where the embedded JPEG starts and ends, we can yank it right out of there. With JPEGs, this is actually pretty easy.

A JPEG image consists of a sequence of segments, each beginning with a marker, each of which begins with a 0xFF byte, followed by a byte indicating what kind of marker it is.

Short name	Bytes	Name
SOI	0xFF 0xD8	Start Of Image
…	…	…
EOI	0xFF 0xD9	End Of Image

Wikipedia: JPEG

So all our script needs to do is:

1. Skip every byte until we find 0xFFD8.
2. Output those two bytes and every subsequent byte…
3. Up to, and including 0xFFD9.

We actually don’t know the format of this proprietary Rockstar file, so it’s possible that 0xFFD8 appears somewhere in the file before the actual JPEG data starts, but I didn’t see that in my testing. If you hexdump one of these files, you’ll see the ASCII JPEG and JFIF mentioned early in the file. These aren’t magic numbers, so it’s possible that we can somehow extract the offset and length for the image data from around there. I didn’t dive into that though.

Here’s a simple script to extract these JPEGs. If this were an important app, C and Rust are typically better languages for iterating over a bunch of bytes, but we can knock out a simple ruby script in 10 minutes for a toy like this!

# Convert Red Dead Redemption 2 Photos to JPEG.
# Usage: ruby convert.rb < PRDR3834231157 > photo.jpg

prev_byte = 0x00
in_jpg = false

$stdin.each_byte do |byte|
  if in_jpg
    print byte.chr
    exit if byte == 0xD9 && prev_byte == 0xFF
  elsif byte == 0xD8 && prev_byte == 0xFF
    print "\xFF\xD8"
    in_jpg = true
  end
  prev_byte = byte
end

As great as the photo mode is, all the photos it captures are exported in 1080p. It doesn’t seem to matter what your in-game resolution is. Instead, setup your photo as you normally would, press the “Hide GUI” button, and use your OS to take the screenshot. If you use Steam, you can also pretty the F12 key to have Steam take the screenshot. See the table above for where you can find these Steam screenshots.