Gadgetory

hey everyone today we're looking at GTA 5 which finally ships for PC and it's been a long time in development and the reason for this development becomes apparent when we look at the game settings its graphics optimizations and its overall performance on PC and that's something we'll talk about in a few moments here today what we're looking at is the video card performance in GTA 5 when using a 4790k CPU so we're looking at raw GPU performance for comparative purposes and I tested everything from a 250 X all the way up to a Titan X and sli gtx 980 s so there's a lot of variety here in fact I've got so many video cards around me right now I don't really have anywhere to put my arms so we have a lot of stuff and the game is fairly interesting from a benchmarking perspective and it's something we'll be including in all GP reviews going forward for the immediate future at least and this is because it includes a few new options in the settings menu one of the most immediately useful outputs in the GTA 5 settings menu is the video RAM consumption or the memory consumption made by your GPU dependent upon the graphics settings currently configured in the game so this doesn't show the constant usage of video memory but it shows the maximum theoretical consumption of video memory as your settings dictate if you lower the settings in the game it will lower the maximum the peak consumption of video RAM and this is useful for configuring options to make sure you're getting optimum performance for the GPU you've got and the amount of memory it's got available to it so this game is one that will run better in theory with 4 gigabyte or better video cards but we did test it with 2 gigabyte and even a one gigabyte card just for comparison purposes to see how true that statement is and whether you can get by on 2 gigabyte video card with GTA 5 we also tested it at 4k 1440 and 1080 resolution so big range there huge undertaking for us those who are gaming on high resolution monitors will definitely need a higher end card because some of the settings in the game are fairly graphics intensive and will go over a few of those now before getting to the frame rate charts some of the biggest items on the list are the three slider options on the graphics settings tab which include population density population variety and then distance scaling population density is the amount of NPCs and NPC interactable objects drawn to the screen at any given time so the higher this slider is in the bar the more NPCs you'll have rendered to the screen this increases the geometry drawn it increases the polygon count and and eats into our poly budget and it also makes more draw calls to the to the GPU from the CPU so it places heavier load on both the CPU and the GPU in this instance increasing population density will have a fairly noticeable impact on gameplay as well because you'll have more NPCs you can interact with but it does eat into performance so make that note population variety just educated speculation here I have not confirmed this with Rockstar I believe is the the amount of objects and NPCs and things of that sort perhaps vehicles drawn to screen at any given time before it starts repeating objects and reusing some of those models effectively recycling assets that are on the screen so a higher population variety will increase the immersive nature of the game and then we've got distance scaling in the graphics tab and the expandable view distance in the advanced graphics tab view distance and distance scaling impact the level of detail and the amount and proximity with which objects are drawn as you approach them so if you are farther away from say this the downtown area of the city and you're maybe approaching in a jet and you've got a shorter view distance you will not see the city until you're effectively within interaction range of the environment it'll start rendering and buildings will pop up and level of detail will increase as you approach the city level of detail much lower as you're farther away from the city because you don't need all those high-resolution textures and finite geometry details when you're farther away other settings include shadow settings like Nvidia's P CSS or percentage closer softer shadows and and these contact hardening shadows or CHS both of these technologies do you somewhat similar things but have different methodologies and implementations in their approach CHS will change the sharpness or blurriness of the shadows edges depending on its distance from the light in the game so if the light source is farther away it will impact how soft the edges of the shadow of to be a bit more realistic and believable P CSS does something kind of similar and we've talked about it in the past we've also got things like texture resolution and quality of shadows and shaders and these things don't impact video memory as much texture resolution has a huge impact on it let's move on to the benchmarks and see what the actual performance of all these video cards is at 4k resolution using ultra settings which I define in the benchmark linked in the description below and the test methodology we see that the two PNY GTX 980 s which are overclocked cards outperform everything else getting 56 frames per second on average when 0 AAA is applied and then following that is the Titan X which is a $1000 video card which performs at 40 FPS average in my article linked in the description below I explained that 40 to 50 FPS is adequate for playing GTA 5 comfortably and smoothly it is not the kind of high precision game that demands 60 FPS constantly so if you're at 40 or 50 FPS you're in pretty good shape 40 is it's getting a little bit close to the dangerzone because when things get more crazy there will be jobs that are noticeable but 30 is not where I would want to be the GTX 980 stand alone is at 30 so it's not great for 4k at Ultra settings and then there are nine 290 X falls below 30 FPS average and is not really something we recommend for playing 4k with ultra settings looking at high settings though it becomes a bit of a different story the Titan X is suddenly pushing 63 fps so very playable at high settings with 4k resolution and still looks great too the GTX 980 for gigabyte card runs at 47 fps and we did not test the sli 980 s here because we effectively determined that if you have them you would not be playing 4k on high you would be playing 4k on try the 290x is finally a more playable framerate at 39 we'd probably still drop a few of the settings just a tick to push it to 40 or a little above 40 but still very playable at 39 for the most part other than when it gets very crazy moving on to 1440p we look at the GTX 980 s and sli at the very top with about a hundred FPS on average followed by the Titan X at 80 the 980 at 65 and so forth at this point if you're trying to play GTA 5 at 1440 resolution with ultra settings we would probably encourage you to purchase something along the lines of a GTX 970 which does not appear in this benchmark due to availability but would perform similarly to the GTX 780 in this benchmark so the 970 would be our key recommendation therefore 1440 and then on the AMD side the 290 X which is very affordable these days is a very value intensive competitor with Nvidia 1080 gaming with ultra settings really has the top end cards blowing this game away you should probably just play on a high resolution or use vs RDS our virtual and dynamic super resolutions from AMD and NVIDIA if you have a higher-end card because they can push it so might as well but if you just want to play 1080 with ultra or very high settings then you would do pretty well on a GTX 770 and r9 285 even a gtx 960 4 gigabyte model or 2 gigabyte bottle do pretty well with the settings as they are at 1080p you could drop them just a tad if you wanted to improve performance slightly of the 960 s and then anything above that is getting to be a bit excessive so we would recommend the 960 and the 285 at this price range if you've got a 770 you're already in good shape as for the 270x it falls a little bit close to our limit for playable fps so we would recommend the 270 X in the instance you are playing 1080p with high settings not ultra settings as you can see in this next chart the 270x pushes 60 F gas at high with 1080p so very strong performer at $140 it makes a good price point the 750 Ti if you prefer Nvidia and want to limit your TDP requirements and your power cables and make run easier performs at 52 FPS so it's a close contender to the 270x and its price about the same and you just kind of have to make that judgment call on your own whether you care about those extra and video features at the end of the day the best video cards for GTA 5 are fairly obvious based on these charts the 970 is great for 1440p and the 980 and sli or a Titan X would do excellently for 4k at Ultra settings if you are playing 1080p like most of us do then you can get away with just about anything that's in the mid-range market so that'd be 200 or higher in terms of initial buying cost the gtx 960 is a very stable and reliable card with a lot of technology on it that those who like doing streaming and things like that can take advantage of and then if you prefer AMD or you just want the higher raw FPS output at a similar price the 280 acts would be worth looking at that's about two hundred thirty two hundred forty dollars depending on what you buy so those would be my recommendations from both major manufacturers on each side if you want more detail I would encourage you to check out the article into the description below as it has the full benchmark the charts the game settings and all that stuff it's pretty cool if you want to do the test yourself we help you figure out how to do that so let me know what you think about GTA 5 let me know what you think about the graphics in the comments below I'm curious to hear if you think that this is a direction we want to go in the industry where we're finally utilizing PC hardware to its fullest extent or would you rather see resources diverted elsewhere thanks again for watching subscribe to the channel if you like this content it helps us a lot if you subscribe and definitely leave a comment or like things or tweet at us at gamers Nexus as we do interact with all those means of communication and I will see you all next time you