Nearly seven years after its PC release, Red Dead Redemption 2 remains one of the most visually impressive open-world games ever made. However, despite its advanced lighting, weather effects, and environmental detail, Rockstar‘s Western masterpiece never received native hardware-accelerated ray tracing support. Fortunately, modders have now stepped in to address that omission.
Modder BadassBaboon has released Reality Redemption 2, a new graphics overhaul that introduces hardware-accelerated ray tracing, including ray-traced global illumination (RTGI), ambient occlusion, and shadows.
The headline feature is undoubtedly RTGI with support for up to three light bounces, allowing indirect lighting to interact more naturally with the surrounding environment. This should be particularly noticeable in interiors, where reflected sunlight can illuminate otherwise shadowed surfaces and produce more convincing color bleeding.
The mod also introduces ray-traced ambient occlusion, which enhances the shading of objects and surfaces, alongside ray-traced shadows. However, the latter currently only supports static geometry, meaning dynamic objects and characters are not yet covered by the new RT shadowing system.
Beyond its ray tracing enhancements, Reality Redemption 2 improves the game’s existing planar and screen-space water reflections, making them sharper and reducing smearing artifacts. Importantly, these are improvements to the existing reflection techniques rather than a newly introduced ray-traced reflection system.
BadassBaboon has also made the new features extensively configurable. Players can adjust the number of light bounces, customize RTGI intensity and color, and independently enable or disable the various ray tracing and water reflection effects.
What’s particularly interesting is that Reality Redemption 2 takes a different approach from earlier graphics modifications. As Wccftech previously covered, Red Dead Redemption 2 has already benefited from ReShade-based effects, including Nice Guy’s Complete Ray Tracing shader. However, those enhancements primarily rely on screen-space information, whereas BadassBaboon’s new project explicitly introduces hardware RT.
The modder is no stranger to Rockstar’s games, either. They previously developed the original Reality Redemption overhaul for the first Red Dead Redemption, which received a PC release in November 2024, alongside the RealityV and V: Definitive Edition projects.
For now, Reality Redemption 2 is available as a beta release exclusively compatible with DirectX 12. Players using the Vulkan API will need to switch to DX12 through the game’s advanced graphics settings before attempting to use it.
The developer hasn’t published detailed performance benchmarks or minimum GPU requirements, so the actual performance overhead remains to be established. Given the addition of multi-bounce RTGI and other hardware RT effects, the impact on GPU performance will be especially interesting to evaluate.
Those interested can download the Reality Redemption 2 beta through the developer’s Patreon announcement, which contains a publicly accessibleGoogle Drive link.
About the author: Sebastian Castellanos is a data scientist by education and training. He’s also deeply passionate about PC gaming hardware and software. He has recently started writing technical articles and guides on Wccftech about PC hardware, games and mods.
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