Gadgetory

what's up guys welcome back to the channel so I've got some different plan for today not your typical and boxing or review but rather instead I'm going to be testing out a product that I already own which is my GTX 970 it's an EVGA for the win edition so it's factory overclocked it's running its stock right now I didn't push it any further for the purpose of this video what I'm gonna be doing with it today is I'm going to be running GTA 4 at 4k and I'm going to see how much we can get away with in terms of eye candy and different filters and things like that and what kind of sacrifices you might have to make if you're going to try to play this game with a 970 at 4k so this is actually running at 4k right now I'm getting about there's an FPS counter in the top left corner of the screen it's really tiny it's the steam overlay one and if you can see I might try to enlarge it and post-production if I can but I'm going about anywhere from the low 60s to the hub to the mid 70s it's it's a little lower than average right now I'd say because there's a lot of foliage like I'm in the mountains and grass is really taxing on your hardware in this game performance really takes a hit when you're running through a lot of greenery but so bear that in mind but basically I want to start off also by saying that since this is a GTX 970 that we're working with we only do have three and a half gigs of gddr5 memory not the advertised for and there's that whole debacle that I'm not going to get into right now I'm just strictly talking about the specs as they stand so we need to be mindful when tuning the settings in this game to not exceed that 3.5 gig limit I'm going to the settings here and under graphics you'll find the majority of your settings and you'll see right here I'm running a 4k I've got vsync turned off and I've got pretty much everything on minimum settings this is like the lowest lowest of the lows right here actually I take that back we can actually crank these up all the way because they have no effect on performance whatsoever uh but as far as all these other settings here and you know how much of a difference do they really make well I was kind of exploring experimenting and with trial and error today and I kind of drew some conclusions that I wanted to share with you guys the first thing I want to show you guys it's easier to just show you than it is to explain it but I'm gonna run through drive through the mountains here and visually the game still looks great even with everything turned down I mean everything's super sharp and it looks it still looks way better than then the original on ps4 or Xbox one but you might notice especially when I'm running past the trees if you look at the trees that are in the distance and as I approach them and the hillside as well this the shadows kind of just pop up out of nowhere when I get close enough to them which can be kind of distracting and that's the that's the shadow the shadow draw distance basically or the distance at which the game engine begins to render shadows and right now I have that like I said everything's turned way down and like you know the lower quality textures I can deal with and even the like the shadows that are like the shadow of my car even though it's not like super sharp it's a little blurry I can deal with that because it's consistent and it's not constantly changing in front of me so I don't really notice it it kind of just blends into the the rest of the environment but as far as like the shadows on the trees and all the other objects as I'm approaching them that's what really throws me off and pulls me out of the game personally so what I want to do is address that problem by going into my settings and this is just speaking of personal preference I mean you guys can emulate this if you want on your own systems but if you don't like it obviously you don't have to this is just kind of me sharing my my thoughts and my experience on this game so what I what I did is actually with shadow quality you'll notice that if you go to advanced graphics that the extended shadows distance option is completely grayed out that's because you can only access that setting if you have your shadow quality turned to very high so I'm going to turn to very high and then you'll notice that I can now adjust the extended shadows distance setting so I'm going to crank that up all the way as well as as well as distance scaling extended distance scaling and crank that up as well now it's saying it's going to increase our video RAM usage so I'm going to be mindful I have gpu-z opened up on another window so I have to keep a lookout on that window to make sure that we're not maxing out our video Ram because then we're gonna start getting artifacts and it's gonna be bad so I'm also going to go to graphics here and just turn up the regular distance scaling I don't know if you noticed but when I was driving through those mountains there would be some bushes that wouldn't appear until I was like 30 feet away or even some road signs that wouldn't appear until I got really close to them and that's what really brings me out of the game it's not so much the lower quality textures of the environment as a whole it's when things are appearing out of nowhere magically in front of me that that really kills the kills the vibe or kills kills the realism of the game so now you'll notice as I'm driving through here frame rates have taken a bit of a hit we're at 50 low 50s now so that's that's to be expected then you'll notice I can't really drive right now yeah frame rates pretty choppy right now but then you'll also notice that when I pass through the trees the the game engine is actually rendering the shadows a lot further out the draw distance for the shin both the shadows and the objects themselves are a lot further out so they're being rendered a lot earlier and I'm not noticing them appear magically right in front of me as soon as you know when I get 10 feet away from them and this really helps bring me back into the game where I can kind of just focus on what's ahead of me and because you know our eyes are very focused on movement we can catch the smallest thing moving like the smallest net or fly in the distance moving because our eyes are naturally really good at picking up motion so when those shadows and those objects are appearing out of nowhere fairly close to me it's distracting so and also speaking of which we are just under our three and a half gig memory limit we're at three point we just hit three point five actually we we passed it we're at three thousand five hundred and four megabytes so we're actually four megabytes over what we should be over our threshold here but hopefully we won't see any artifacting so far everything looks pretty crystal clear on my end honestly I think forty four the the mid 40 frames per second range is too low for most of us in fact it's too low for me and I wouldn't I wouldn't consider it enjoyable gameplay its playable but it's not enjoyable for me I want some buttery smooth at least you know in the mid 60s average before I can be like alright I'm completely immersed now so what I'm gonna go what I'm gonna do is go back to jump back into the settings here into graphics we're going to try to find a way to up our frame rate again so in the Advanced Settings I'm going to reduce this just a little bit msaa if you're rocking this a 4k on a single card even if it's a 980 probably turn it off I mean it does help a lot it really smooths up the edges on pretty much everything at just at x2 but there's an even bigger impact on performance there I mean I was seeing at least 15 to 20 frames being dropped going from off to 2x which is just it's just too much it's too big of a sacrifice for me fxaa is you know obviously not as taxing on the GPU but it doesn't look quite as nice as MSAA either instead of sampling the instances of a jagged line or an edge it kind of just blurs it it kind of creates the illusion that it's smooth but it kind of gives this blurred effect and I don't really like the way it looks personally these three I found no difference in performance so I kind of just left it preference if you like lots of people go ahead and crank it up all the way it doesn't really matter as far as texture quality doesn't affect frame rates as much as it does video RAM and since we're limited on that at this point I'm definitely keeping that to normal theater quality I mean kind of the inverse of texture didn't affect my video round as much but affected my frame rates by like four to six frames per second so keeping that on normal as well but back to the issue at hand I went on a huge tangent there I kind of just rambling here we're just hanging out hangouts casual there's no script here can go off the handle that's cool I need to find a way to raise the frame rates back up all right guys I just stumbled upon a discovery just now that I wasn't expecting obviously I went to the settings and I had a hunch that the soft shadow setting was doing something finicky because it was working I was getting much higher frame rates earlier than what you just saw when I had the soft shadows changed to soft and then I was doing some reach research online a lot of people were saying I was switch to you know the the manufacturer of your of your graphics card which I also said earlier and I switched it back to soft just like that and my frame rates instantly went back up to the mid 70s or the low 70s I guess which is still I don't know like 10 frames per second better or more than than what I was just getting you can see I'm at like 79 80 right now so apparently that is a huge a huge consideration for for hardware impact performance impact and and the shadows we don't really look that much different to me honestly um I am going to do more research on that but that's I'm really glad that I stumbled across that because now we're getting beautiful like in the mid to low 70s range you know and now now instead of dipping into the 50s and even the 40s which was virtually unplayable for me anyway now we're dipping into the 60s instead and that's much more tolerable and now and now this is great this looks fantastic I'm gaming it 4k pitches I mean obviously it's hard for you to tell exactly the quality that I'm seeing right now because you know obviously I'm rendering this video out at 1080 and uploading it to YouTube and there's compression all that sort of thing but it looks really really good to me and I think the trade-off here is worth it in my opinion I think that getting those extra pixels really make the game look a lot sharper and despite the the filters the various filters that you have to turn down to normal the game still looks better than it does at quad HD with a lot of those filters turned out well this also leads to questions about the GTX 970 in general is it still a good card because it's only three and a half gigs well I think it's still a good card if if that's if three and a half gigs of video ram suits your play style for example if you want it to game if you want to play this game at 4k and you still wanted some of that extra additional eye candy you know like msaa and whatnot then I I don't know I don't know if I would recommend the 970 is someone who's who's looking for that kind of gaming experience however if you're like me and you're satisfied with the way this looks or you just you know you're like me and you game it something lower than 4k regularly like I gave it quad HD I'm at 2560 by 1440 95% of the time and so you know obviously at that I have a lot more leeway and I can crank up the settings a bit more and the game looks fantastic but yeah if you're a power user especially if you're using like texture packs or you're doing a lot of mods like you're playing Skyrim things like that you're gonna want that extra 500 gigs that extra 500 gigs goes a long way like I said I'm at I'm at 3.6 gigs of video ram usage right now and knock on wood that I'm not getting any kind of artifacts for tapping into that slower bank of memory that's a board my GTX 970 but um it's just uh it's just you know that it is what it is and you have to make the call for yourself based on your specific needs as a user so do you think it's worth having that higher resolution having those extra pixels and turning down a lot of those filter I don't know what's the trade-off you know how did the scales weigh in your guys's opinion I'm really curious to know but this has been a cool video thank you guys so much for watching I'm Kyla blossom sauce Network feel free to like the video if you enjoyed it for all of its weirdness and randomness and thank you guys for watching subscribe to the channel if you haven't already I'll see you guys in the next one