Red Dead Redemption for Xbox Series X|S is finally here, and now that most of you should have gotten your free upgrade if you were eligible, we're sure plenty of Xbox fans have been enjoying this Rockstar classic at 60FPS. Well, the folks at Digital Foundry are here as well to dive deep into this new version, including how the game stacks up against the old 360 code.
We've thrown the video version of this up above; DF tackles the Xbox versions last, at roughly 11 minutes 30 in the clip. The long and short of it is that the new versions match the old backwards compatible enhanced editions in terms of resolution (1440p on Series S, 4K on Series X), but the boost to LOD and frame rate are big wins for this new native port.
"The biggest improvement for existing RDR owners by far comes on Xbox Series consoles, which had previously been limited to a back-compat version of the 15-year-old Xbox 360 original. [...] This many years on, that had been the best version available on Series X, with no option to uncap its frame-rate or update its visual feature set to anything approximating the 2024 PC version. Series S owners could access something similar with a jump to 1440p resolution that was also chained to a dated graphics base - a fact that became all too clear once we compared those to a native PS4 version of RDR in 2023.
This week, native hardware support finally comes to RDR on Xbox Series consoles along with PS5. Each still operates at the same high pixel counts - 4K on Series X and PS5, 1440p on Series S - but now Xbox performance jumps to 60fps, and all console versions enjoy visual settings much closer to ultra settings on PC. This is not a remaster with remade assets, so geometry and texture quality are only equivalent to the PC version, not wholly redrawn. But we're still getting enough new boosts to even surpass the high-quality PS4 version from two years ago."
This all matches up nicely with our initial hands-on impressions with RDR on Xbox Series X|S; while the 360 version remained impressive, the boosts to visual clarity and more importantly frame rate make for nice enhancements in 2025. Sure, we'd have liked to see this classic rebuilt in the Red Dead Redemption 2 engine, but it's still nice to have this native current-gen version now available on Xbox.