Grand Theft Auto V Benchmarked, Performance Review

[Steve]

It's been nearly two decades, but I can still remember wreaking havoc in the original Grand Theft Auto and GTA 2 like it was yesterday. Now seven years after GTA IV's arrival, fans have been craving for the next installment, which landed some 18 months ago on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, as you're undoubtedly aware. With a handful of delays now in the rearview mirror PC gamers are finally getting their chance to play.

On the upside, Rockstar has made many improvements to the PC version, including increased resolution and graphical detail, denser traffic, greater draw distances, upgraded AI, new wildlife, and advanced weather and damage effects. So far GTA V looks to be a well-executed port truly optimized for PC, but we'll have a better notion of this after some tests.

Read the complete review.

 

[hahahanoobs]

That "gimped" GTX 970 is right up there ain't it? I can't wait until my GTA V download is finished!

 

[thorpj]

I wanted to find out how the game runs on GPUs on very high at 1080p

And that benchmark is not there. 1080 normal then it goes to 1600p very high

 

[Burty117]

It upsets me that my 780 can't keep 60fps @ 1080p Very High settings (sometimes it even drops below 30fps!)

Although I'm still enjoying the game a lot and compared to the console versions it runs considerably better and looks better

 

[Steve]

That "gimped" GTX 970 is right up there ain't it? I can't wait until my GTA V download is finished!

No surprises there the GTX 970 is a weapon even with 3.5GB of memory.

I wanted to find out how the game runs on GPUs on very high at 1080p

And that benchmark is not there. 1080 normal then it goes to 1600p very high

We didn’t see the point since the very high textures are designed for high-end GPU’s which are designed to run at high resolutions.

That being said with the use of some basic maths you should be able to pretty accurately work out where any of these graphics cards land at 1080p. Helping to make life even easier we only saw a 2fps drop when going from normal textures to very high textures assuming you have enough VRAM. So just take the 1080p results using the normal texture quality as a rough guideline.

Obviously we can’t test every possible scenario so we try to include a range that will help fill in any gaps with relative ease.

 

[Burty117]

viously we can’t test every possible scenario so we try to include a range that will help fill in any gaps with relative ease.

Agreed, I wonder how the 4GB 770 gets on using the higher settings? It has the VRAM for it and the chip itself is no slouch itself. It would be cool to see a comparison in a game like this that actually uses this much VRAM. Then it'll be interesting if spending that little bit more for double the VRAM actually helps

I wonder if there is an article out there covering this for GTA yet...

 

[melkiik]

OP:

"Unfortunately, AMD's processors had a fairly rough time in this title. The AMD FX-8370E delivered virtually the same miserable performance as the old Phenom II X6 1100T. This is a real shame as GTA V is one of the few games we have tested recently that does a good job utilizing more than four threads."

"same miserable performance as the old Phenom II X6 1100T"

love you too Steve. Debate still in fresh memory I guess. And you dance on my grave man.

I was considering to buy this title, but after this...

 

[Steve]

OP:

"Unfortunately, AMD's processors had a fairly rough time in this title. The AMD FX-8370E delivered virtually the same miserable performance as the old Phenom II X6 1100T. This is a real shame as GTA V is one of the few games we have tested recently that does a good job utilizing more than four threads."

"same miserable performance as the old Phenom II X6 1100T"

love you too Steve. Debate still in fresh memory I guess. And you dance on my grave man.

I was considering to buy this title, but after this...

Sorry mate but it's nothing new so the 'debate' had nothing to do with the comments...

https://www.techspot.com/review/962-evolve-benchmarks/page5.html

"The older Phenom II range showed its age in Evolve and incredibly the Pentium G3220 was able to match the Phenom II X6 1100T with 66fps -- 24% slower than the Core i5-3470."

 

[SirDigby]

That "gimped" GTX 970 is right up there ain't it? I can't wait until my GTA V download is finished!

No surprises there the GTX 970 is a weapon even with 3.5GB of memory.

I think you should've thrown in some maximum and minimums in here. Playing with my EVGA GTX 970 SC on 1080p Max settings, I have do have the average 60FPS if I'm not doing anything intensive, however driving down the highway in a police chase - where the frame rate is more crucial - it drops to about 20 which is playable, if not fluid, and I got the odd stuttering. I have played for 12 hours and it crashed once so far (as I was Michael driving down to do the Bike Race with his son), restarting the game resulted in a broken world, with things not loading in properly, including pedestrians and entire chunks of the world, however a second restart solved every issue.
Being familiar with game crashes I didn't see this particularly as a problem, rather just an inconvenience as the game does save as you go along. Worst game for crashing was Dungeon Keeper 2 on Windows XP onwards, it started off operating well, but the more you played it the more it crashed, until you were saving the game every 5 minutes from fear of losing everything.

 

[hahahanoobs]

That "gimped" GTX 970 is right up there ain't it? I can't wait until my GTA V download is finished!

No surprises there the GTX 970 is a weapon even with 3.5GB of memory.

I think you should've thrown in some maximum and minimums in here. Playing with my EVGA GTX 970 SC on 1080p Max settings, I have do have the average 60FPS if I'm not doing anything intensive, however driving down the highway in a police chase - where the frame rate is more crucial - it drops to about 20 which is playable, if not fluid, and I got the odd stuttering.

I too would like to see min and max fps, especially when almost everyone else is doing that and/or frame time latency.

I'd also like to see a patch come out soon to reduce frame drops I keep hearing about.

I'd also like to see a patch from Rockstar and drivers from both camps addressing the poor multi-GPU scaling. Neither camp does well here. I've seen two reviews (Forbes and TechPowerUp) that had the GTX 970 matching 290X's in Crossfire @ 1080p and 20fps difference @ 1440p.

That "gimped" GTX 970 is right up there ain't it? I can't wait until my GTA V download is finished!

No surprises there the GTX 970 is a weapon even with 3.5GB of memory.

I wanted to find out how the game runs on GPUs on very high at 1080p

And that benchmark is not there. 1080 normal then it goes to 1600p very high

We didn’t see the point since the very high textures are designed for high-end GPU’s which are designed to run at high resolutions.

I would agree with you if 1080p wasn't the most popular resolution among gamers (source: Steam hardware survey), and the popularity of 120Hz+ monitors. The days of 60fps being enough are over.

 

[yukka]

What's it going to look like on a 460gtx?

 

[TS-56336]

@Steve = Will this run with a Pentium G840 2.8 Ghz, Radeon HD4890 and 4gb DDr3 ram?

 

[Peter Farkas]

We have to admit that it scales pretty well all the way from normal quality 1080p to maxed quality @4K.
Funny we still have Phenom II X4 in the CPU charts. I think it's time lo let it go (of course with tears in our eyes as it was a real sweet spot in its time).

Cheers

 

[amstech]

Great review Mr. Walton.
Another game making short work of todays GPU's @ 4k it seems.

 

[Steve]

@Steve = Will this run with a Pentium G840 2.8 Ghz, Radeon HD4890 and 4gb DDr3 ram?

Doubt it, at least not very well anyway.

What's it going to look like on a 460gtx?

Slow

Great review Mr. Walton.
Another game making short work of todays GPU's @ 4k it seems.

Yeah I have to admit I don't see the point in 4K gaming yet.

I have the Dell UltraSharp 32 (4K) and Dell UltraSharp U3014 30 (2560x1600) and I much prefer the 2560x1600 screen right now for work and play. Games are much smoother and honestly look very much the same. I fail to see how 4K desktops are more useful, I scale up the 2560x1600 screen as it is so I can have two full screen windows side by side. Anyway 4K rant over

 

[Nobina]

I tried running this on 260x and it's OK at 1080p medium textures and others are high. Except...there's some kind of unusual stuttering which is not FPS related I guess it's CPU bottleneck.

 

[Lionvibez]

That "gimped" GTX 970 is right up there ain't it? I can't wait until my GTA V download is finished!

No surprises there the GTX 970 is a weapon even with 3.5GB of memory.

I wanted to find out how the game runs on GPUs on very high at 1080p

And that benchmark is not there. 1080 normal then it goes to 1600p very high

We didn’t see the point since the very high textures are designed for high-end GPU’s which are designed to run at high resolutions.

That being said with the use of some basic maths you should be able to pretty accurately work out where any of these graphics cards land at 1080p. Helping to make life even easier we only saw a 2fps drop when going from normal textures to very high textures assuming you have enough VRAM. So just take the 1080p results using the normal texture quality as a rough guideline.

Obviously we can’t test every possible scenario so we try to include a range that will help fill in any gaps with relative ease.

I would have liked to see 1080 numbers for very high also

I'm on a 7970Ghz and a 1920x1200 monitor.

I was able to figure it out based on looking at multiple reviews on the net but would have been nice if you had it

I know this was alot of work though so thank you for the review.

 

[GhostRyder]

Great review @Steve I was waiting to see your in depth analysis of the game and was even glad to see the 4K results as that is what I am shooting for. I still will wait a bit to make my purchase, however I am glad to see its playable maxed out at least on 2 cards so hopefully my trio will do some damage.

Glad to see this game likes threads, we needs most games to encourage the use of more threads as that is the only way we are going to see some better performance for the time being. I want to push my 5930K to the limit

 

[Dave321]

I wanted to find out how the game runs on GPUs on very high at 1080p

And that benchmark is not there. 1080 normal then it goes to 1600p very high

Completely agree. The vast majority of gamers are using a 1080p monitor.

 

[Dave321]

I tried running this on 260x and it's OK at 1080p medium textures and others are high. Except...there's some kind of unusual stuttering which is not FPS related I guess it's CPU bottleneck.

It's probably using too much vram.

 

[Dave321]

It upsets me that my 780 can't keep 60fps @ 1080p Very High settings (sometimes it even drops below 30fps!)

Although I'm still enjoying the game a lot and compared to the console versions it runs considerably better and looks better

Turn grass no higher than very high and turn off the advanced graphics options. Use 2X msaa with txaa.

 

[Scorpus]

Here's an Eyefinity report for you all.

Three 1080p monitors (5760 x 1080) powered by two Radeon R9 290s in CrossFire.

Game runs perfectly in triple-monitor mode out of the box, with great field of view in both third and first person mode. Some minor HUD issues that could easily be resolved with a patch, but it mostly works great. A bit of stuttering with CrossFire enabled but that's not due to Eyefinity.

I ran the game on all Ultra settings with AMD soft shadows, FXAA, and no advanced settings. Typical frame rates were 40-50 FPS just messing about in the city. Benchmarked at 52 FPS average.

 

[crimson87]

Hi , I have an FX 6300 @ 4.1 and an OC GTX 760 (2GB). My aim is to play this at 1080p with the Ultra Textures on. Is it true that I won't be able to see any IQ improvement with Ultra Textures at 1080p? I've seen comparison screenshots and Normal Textures look slightly above PS3...

Coming from playing GTA IV with Icenhancer mods at 1080p and settings cranked up to 11 I would only settle for graphics as good as those. Is that feasible with a setup like mine?

I wouldn't mind playing at a steady 30 FPS , disabling all the advanced options as well as dialing all the sliders to 50% to reach that balance between performance and IQ.

Thanks!

 

[Sniped_Ash]

It upsets me that my 780 can't keep 60fps @ 1080p Very High settings (sometimes it even drops below 30fps!)

Although I'm still enjoying the game a lot and compared to the console versions it runs considerably better and looks better

Try disabling vsync in the game and forcing vsync & triple buffering through the Nvidia control panel. I got that tip from someone with a 770 and it solved the same issue I was having with my 970. Framerates would usually tank during cutscenes, even ones that take place in a single room with only two characters and that vsync trick has fixed it so far.

It also seems like grass at Ultra, MSAA x4 & x8, and SSAO at High are the biggest performance hits for me.

 

[Skidmarksdeluxe]

That "gimped" GTX 970 is right up there ain't it? I can't wait until my GTA V download is finished!

Lucky you. If I had to download it on my 10MB DSL line GTA 6 will have been released by time my download is finished.