Grand Theft Auto V Benchmarked: Graphics & CPU Performance

It'south been nearly two decades, but I can nonetheless recall wreaking havoc in the original Yard Theft Auto and GTA ii like it was yesterday. Both games were a smash just Rockstar really blew our minds when it shifted from bird'southward-eye visuals to a fully 3D game engine and environment with GTA III in 2001, allowing players to experience open world mayhem across Liberty City from a third-person perspective.

Having found a winning formula, Rockstar followed up with two more crime simulators: Vice City arrived a year afterwards and then San Andreas two years after that, both of which were powered by Criterion's RenderWare engine (similar GTA III) while 2008'due south GTA Iv is more than of a true successor with larger gameplay changes and graphics based on Rockstar'southward own engine (RAGE).

Rockstar has fabricated many improvements to the PC version, including increased resolution and graphical detail, denser traffic, greater depict distances, upgraded AI, new wildlife, and advanced weather and harm effects.

Naturally, the PC version of GTA Iv was delayed from leap to holiday 2008, though it shipped with enhanced features such as traffic density control, depict distance configurations, a replay editor, a customizable radio station for your own music, and 32 player online sessions instead of 16 actor.

Now seven years after GTA 4'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 enlightened of thanks to the game's $265 million development and marketing budget. Afterward watching GTA V ship for electric current-gen consoles terminal Nov, PC gamers are finally getting their take chances to play in Rockstar'due south latest sandbox this week.

On the upside, Rockstar has fabricated many improvements to the PC version, including increased resolution and graphical item, denser traffic, greater draw distances, upgraded AI, new wild fauna, and avant-garde weather and damage effects.

Though it sounds great on paper, some of previous Rockstar ports have disappointed -- including GTA 4 -- though Max Payne three was pretty special and we wound upwardly spending a lot of fourth dimension benchmarking new GPUs with that game. So far GTA 5 looks to be a well-executed port truly optimized for PC, but we'll have a better notion of this after some tests.

Testing Methodology

We used the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers on 26 DirectX 11 graphics card configurations covering most price ranges. Our test rig was outfitted with the Intel Core i7-5960X to remove CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-stop GPU scores. For testing we didn't use Fraps and instead relied on the built-in benchmark.

To use the benchmark tool in GTA V, simply launch the game and navigate to the "graphics" menu. Then press the "tab" key to initiate the criterion sequence. Annotation: You need to run through the first "Franklin" mission in the Story Mode of the game for the criterion to operate properly.

All told we ran the benchmark over 350 times. Information technology'south been a long week ;).

Brand sure to set the graphics options y'all want to use before launching the benchmark. The sequence will follow 5 unique scenes in the world of Los Santos simulating a wide array of actual gameplay scenarios. The benchmark will track functioning and output results in the following location: "My Documents\Rockstar Games\GTA V\benchmarks"

Rather than have the result from just one of the v scenes we took the average frame rate from all v scenes. However, as the world in GTA Five is ever changing, the tests are never exactly the same, the traffic density changes quite a bit on each run. Therefore we ran each test 3 times and took the average.

All told nosotros ran the benchmark over 350 times. It'southward been a long week ;).

GTA V was tested at three resolutions, 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160. We tested using the normal textures and the very high textures. Additionally the game was too tested using FXAA and MSAAx4, every bit well as the advanced graphics settings.