Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve and today we're talking about GTA 5 settings this is a settings optimization guide I wrote the full article links in the description below it's been very popular so far so I highly recommend checking out the article for more depth than you will get here but I'll give you an overview with some visuals to emphasize the points that I was making in that article so GTA has a lot of graphics settings it's got the usual anti aliasing anisotropic filtering it has some sort of newer things they've been around for a while we don't normally see tessellation in games as a setting so that is one of them and it's also got some more advanced settings like distance scaling population variety and things like that and I've discussed some of these in the past in other YouTube videos but we're going to go into more depth here so this guide benchmarks a lot of these settings not a 100% of them because that is an insane amount of work but we did spend a couple of days benchmarking at most of these settings to determine what you can tweak to enhance your GPS performance so this is entirely a graphics card optimization guide as it pertains to grand theft auto and by following these steps hopefully you can tweak a couple settings to get the performance gains needed a couple FPS here and there to enhance your playability to a point that it's more fluid and closer to 60fps i've ordered these from most critical to least critical or negligible so following each of these in step will give you the greatest immediate gains and performance the first is multi sample anti-aliasing or MSA a and this has been around for a very long time it is an anti-aliasing technology that smooths out edges at its simplest top level overview and it does this by taking color samples of each pixel equal to the count of MSA a that you've set so if you have 4x msaa it takes four color samples per pixel and that would be one on each quadrant of the pixel effectively and it looks at those samples then determines what color the taxol or the pixel or whatever should be such that it looks the most blended with the background to reduce the jagged edges appearance that we get in a lot of objects a good example of this would be to look at a blade of grass or a fence with chain links or even your character in the mirrors in Grand Theft Auto 5 if you find a mirror a house that has a big interaction with MSAA but MSAA has a massive impact on FPS and it is one of the first things you should limit or disable if you're having trouble running the game I know a lot of people really like it in Grand Theft Auto because it is implemented very well for msaa but it is also a huge hit to perform it's about 20 fps and some of our tests it was closer to 10:15 at 4k tests but when you're talking 46 or so vs. 30s that's a big gap in performance and it needs to just be disabled for the best output of frame rates post effects quality is the next one these are post-processing effects that are applied effectively as filters on the screen for things like bloom which is something that you'll see in high heat situations or with the Sun setting and rising there's also high dynamic range lighting which effects the the coloring and the dynamism of the light and then there are depth of field and motion blur settings which are enabled with higher post effect settings in the game we found about a 6 FPS performance gain by going down one tick in post effects which is a pretty big gain and if you go down more than one tick you'll get more performance output gained as seen in this chart but if you want just a small gain without sacrificing too much in terms of visuals because we do have to make a little bit of sacrifice to play GTA 5 with our video cards I mean I have to do it with a tight net so it's really not a big deal it's actually great news that means the game will scale better so if you want to get a quick couple FPS gain drop it from the max setting to one step below that and then you can get even more if you have to by going yet another step after that that's a field does have a fairly noticeable impact on performance depth of field is actually a true filter that is applied to the game and this is something that's in a couple of other games Unreal Tournament the new one included DOF is basically a layering system and this exists in the photography world it's the exact same there if you're familiar with that if you have a closer up object I have a CPU cooler this is close up to me if I have my in-game camera sort of focused on this everything in the background including the camera will become more blur with different layers of depth so it's effectively levelling the depth based upon distance so that would mean the wall very far in the back is really blurry cameras a little blurry and then this immediate stuff is in focus including the CPU cooler so that's depth of field you can turn that on or disable it depending on if you like it or not it is a filter so it does impact your performance pretty heavily grass has yet another massive impact but it is a situational impact so depend on where your benchmarking the game you might not actually notice this at first this is a problem we ran into when we were benchmarking the game in order to see the impact of grass settings you need to be in a location like a hillside where there's a lot of grass being in the city where there's cut grass doesn't work because it doesn't spawn there so the grass settings effectively dictate whether strands of grass spawn and then those have an animation they move around basically in the wind I don't think it's dynamic with actual wind I think it's just a repeated animation of some kind but I'm not 100% sure on that either way it is very draining on the GPU we saw a performance hits up to 50% where we go from 60 to 30 FPS in some instances of the Titan X and the benchmark sort of emphasizes that point so if you want an immediate gain and performance in the situations where you are on a hillside if you're like why is my phone so great in the city and dies on the mountains then this is the setting to drop immediately I would really recommend considering just going up down to high you can also go down to normal it looks pretty bad but it's it's acceptable in exchange for the performance gain because grass is really one of those settings that's not too critical to getting played shaders are the most notable at greater distances this is something that has a high impact on your performance the previous two were severe and critical so with shaders if you're looking at things like mountainsides in the distance you'll see shading techniques applied to the mountain to the hills where there's some diffusion of shadows across the surface where you see deformation of terrain so this is something that's fairly important to create a real-world scenario as closely as possible in the terms of lighting but it does have a big performance hit in fact it's about 12 FPS from the max setting to the lowest and you can gain a very quick four FPS in our scenario I should heavily emphasize by moving from very high to high so it is one of those settings you look at first to change because you can drop from very high to high not have a huge in game visual impact but have a noticeable for FPS performance improvement in our test case shadows are different from shaders these are seen best by looking at objects people things like that in game and paying close attention to the shadows at varying distances from them in this scenario you can look at the two characters here on normal settings the shadows are more pixelated and jagged and on the higher settings they're more blurred and natural and also you'll notice the shadows continue up to the feet of the characters in these games when you have higher settings whereas with lower settings they stop short so this is where you see the difference there are diminishing returns in our testing between normal and high settings for shadows so we don't really recommend going as low as normal because there's very little gain in performance but there's a fairly big gain in performance by moving from ultra to very high it's a couple FPS and that's definitely worthwhile if you really need if you have PSID puter your game reflection quality impacts puddles mirrors windows things like that and it's really just as the name says it's how good reflections look in their natural environments like in a car window so by lowering the setting you lose some of that but it is one of those very rarely noticed elements when you're really immersed in the game so if you do need a couple FPS you can lower this by one tick and you'll get get that couple FPS pretty quickly particles quality we saw a 5 FPS gain from very high to high so definitely noteworthy and this includes things like metal scraping if you've got something scraping against the road that impacts particles if you drive on dirt and sand that will have a big impact on particles and I actually can really kill your performance more than we found on these charts so lowering it would help in those instances and it also impacts smoke like from tire burnout or spinouts and that's really all particle quality does it is something that we recommend tweaking in small amounts you have performance problems tessellation adds depth to services by deforming the object in ways that make it appear to have more depth when in reality is still the original object for the most part it'll split quads into more tries and things like that if you're getting technical but at a top level one example of tessellation would be to look at a flat two-dimensional plane like a wall and that plane has to have a texture like a brick applied to it where the brick has a 3d appearance in the real world but looks flat because it's on a 2d surface in game tessellation can deform the wall such that the bricks now have an apparent depth to them and this can impact your visual immersion in the game because of the nature of tessellating and object so it is something we recommend enabling in some form texture resolution and quality is something I discussed in another video you can see a quick example the texture qualities here check the channel for that video if you're curious in it anisotropic filtering we generally recommend it leaving at the max or very high settings meaning 8 or 16 X because it has effectively zero performance impact on games anisotropic filtering is not something that hits the GPU or really even the CPU for the most part and what it does is it'll help oblique camera angles in displaying a more realistic scenario for textures so you can see here with the road it gets more blurry as it gets further on the distance with anisotropic filtering you're effectively filtering the texture application such that it has a more trapezoidal application in this instance where the road is going off to a vanishing point so because the the camera angle is aligned with the road in this way that you've got a vanishing point it doesn't make sense to apply the texture as a square on what is effectively a triangular or trapezoidal surface so that's what anisotropic filtering helps with and we recommend leaving it at higher settings there are more settings like ambient occlusion which impacts how light interacts with surfaces in the game and these are things that we discuss some of in the article linked to the description below but we did skip over a few of them like the Advanced Settings it was just a time issue so if there's something you're curious about the answer is time because we've sent a full week on GTA content and it's very intensive and it was a lot of work check out the article for the benchmarks for more information please on the side of the page hit the new cards button to look at the link to that article and to look at our patreon page we're trying to raise funding to do more of these things so we can explore those advanced settings in the future so that time is less of a concern and thanks for watching I will see you all next time you