Gaming and debates go hand-in-hand. On PC, people will always argue about FPS, ray tracing, graphical settings, and so on. While very real, these conversations exist within a range where personal preference matters, and there’s Mongo TV, a Danish YouTuber playing Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4 frames per second, who has gone viral doing it.
For context, a standard film runs at 24 frames per second. Most console games target 30 FPS. Many generally consider 60 FPS the baseline for a smooth experience. At 4 FPS, you are watching roughly one frame every 250 milliseconds. The game is not running. It is advancing through a series of still images at a pace that makes stop-motion animation look fluid. It is less a video game and more a very elaborate slideshow of the American frontier.
Mongo TV is running Red Dead Redemption 2 on an aging laptop equipped with an Intel i5-8300H processor and an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti with 4 GB of VRAM. The GTX 1050 Ti is an entry-level laptop-grade gaming graphics card that launched in 2016, three years before Red Dead Redemption 2 launched on PC in November 2019, with system requirements considered demanding even by the standards of hardware current at the time.
TLDR; Mongo TV is running a demanding game on a laptop equipped with an entry-level gaming GPU released before its time.
The results are exactly what you would expect. The opening chapter of Red Dead Redemption 2, which takes place in the snowy mountains above Colter and typically lasts about two to three hours on normal hardware, took Mongo TV approximately 12 hours to complete. At that rate, a full playthrough of the game’s story, which runs roughly 50 to 60 hours at standard frame rates, would take an estimated 471 hours, or roughly 20 days of playing every day, days on end.
Yet, the video series has gone viral because there is something genuinely compelling about watching someone refuse to let inadequate hardware stop them from experiencing one of the greatest games ever made. Mongo TV is not complaining. He is not asking for sympathy. He is simply playing Red Dead Redemption 2 at 4 FPS and documenting the experience because, why not?
Beyond the obvious humor of watching Arthur Morgan trudge through knee-deep snow at the pace of a glacial time-lapse, it speaks to something real about how people actually experience games versus how the industry and the enthusiast community assume they experience them.
None of this is an argument that 4 FPS is acceptable. It is not. At 4 FPS, the game’s combat is essentially unplayable. Aiming is a guessing game. Horseback riding looks like a series of disconnected photographs. The cinematic moments that define RDR2’s story lose their emotional timing because every pause, every glance, every dramatic beat is stretched across seconds of frozen frames. The experience Mongo TV is having is not the experience Rockstar Games designed. It is a different experience entirely, one that is fascinating to watch precisely because you can’t help but wonder how good a game Red Dead Redemption 2 will still be at these settings?
There’s a certain level of stubbornness in wanting to play a specific game badly enough that you will accept any version of it, no matter how degraded, rather than not play it at all. Viewed from a positive perspective, it just proves why Red Dead Redemption 2 means what it means to this streamer, Rockstar Games’ co-founder, and to the many people who love it enough to turn it into one of the best-selling video games of all time.
