If you are playing RDR2 on a PC that has 4 or fewer CPU cores and your PC is crashing randomly during gameplay, then read on for a possible solution. In my case the game would freeze after a few minutes of gameplay and the entire system would become unresponsive. I had no option but to reset the system as even windows was unresponsive.
I researched this issue and many posts on the net suggest that this is a common problem if you have less than 6 cores in your CPU. Most options suggested using different approaches to ensure that at least one CPU core was kept responsive by ensuring the game did not have access to it. This can be done using many approaches including using process lasso or manually changing the affinity of the RDR2 process in task manager to remove one of the cores from the affinity list. I tried both approaches without success. Finally here is what worked for me.
It seems that the affinity has to be removed from the core named “CPU 0” and not any other core. Earlier I was removing affinity from “CPU 3” and it did not help. Perhaps Windows needs the first core to be responsive and therefore it is important to remove the affinity of the game from “CPU 0”.
Now I am not facing any freeze or crash issues and am getting a decent framerate of 58 FPS on 1920×1080 resolution with medium to high graphics settings. I have an i5 760 Quad CPU paired with a Radeon HD 7950. Let me know if this worked for you in the comments or if you found any other approach that worked for you.
This helped me now in 2020 after trying everything else. I am running process lasso which did nothing alone, but along with disabling core 0 I haven’t crashed for hours.