Wow. After almost a year, I have stumbled upon a totally undocumented, hidden setting that actually appears to solve the asset-loading-related bug in Red Dead Redemption 2.
If you don't know what bug I'm talking about, please see this post.
Rockstar never acknowledged the issue, despite many people reporting it all over the Internet. It's not VR-specific, although the additional stress on the GPU caused by VR rendering made it much more likely to occur.
The freezing issue was particularly bad when traveling around Valentine, and that ruined the experience for many players because Valentine is where you spend most of your time in the beginning of the game. I had implemented a workaround that I called "Antifreeze", and while that would make things much better for most people, it didn't address the root cause which I never found.
For all you guys who are still playing RDR2 or have just discovered it: please download release 3.3.2 attached below and follow the usual update drill, i.e., unzip the new archive into the game executable folder, overwriting the older files. Be careful not to create a subfolder (RealConfig.bat must end up at the same level as RDR2.exe) and don't move anything around manually. Finally run RealConfig and select your favorite preset. Note that if you omit this last step, which is an essential part of any update, the fix won't work.
Big kudos to patrons Solomon Ginsberg and Renaissance for beta-testing the fix!
From this new release Antifreeze will default to None, as hopefully the workaround should no longer be needed.
Call for testers with AMD GPUs: guys, if any of you from Team Red had the freezing issue beforehand, please let me know in the comments if this version works for you too. Until now I only have reports from Team Green.
Other changes in this update: release 3.3.2 makes the detection code for 3D character creation (or "change appearance" mode) in Cyberpunk 2077 more robust and less likely to misfire.
I also upgraded the default quality for CP2077 mirrors from Low to Medium; no impact on frame rate during normal gameplay, but it makes mirrors looks so much better.
Technical details: the hidden, undocumented RDR2 setting I'm talking about is called transferQueuesEnabled. There is no way of changing it from the game menus, and Rockstar never gave any clue as to what it does, or how the game chooses its default value. In the past, at least until May 2021, the setting defaulted to false when you first installed the game. That's why it was set that way in my config presets.
Recently however, while experimenting on RDR2, I randomly discovered that Rockstar must have changed the default at some point in time, because now when you delete the game files and force RDR2 to make a new config, it will set transferQueuesEnabled to true. That appears to be enough to make the freezing issue disappear completely.
If you have a customized config file that you don't want RealConfig to overwrite, you can just use Notepad to make the change yourself, of course while the game is not running.