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Benchmarks
In order to accurately measure the gaming experience across the variety of hardware tested, we decided to forgo the use of minimum and maximum FPS in our results. This is because these values do not accurately represent the actual experience, or ‘smoothness’ of the game’s performance. Instead, we’ll be using the average FPS, as well as the average of the lowest 1%, and 0.1% of results. We believe these results will better showcase the variance in performance.
GTA V 1440P Ultra
As we can see here our three overclocked systems keep up with one another, while our 3.0 GHz i5 is about 20% slower overall. Note how the 5960x is very similar to the other overclocked CPUs, we believe GTA uses up to 4 cores although we’ve noticed it does spread the workload between multiple threads well.
GTA V 1440P High
Here, we see the Hybrid and Professional systems powered by the GTX 970 taking a strong lead, while our XFX AMD R9 290 lags behind. Again clock speed is king as the locked i5 trails behind the other CPUs.
Again we see our GTX 970 systems taking a lead, and our 3.0GHz i5 trails in dead last again. If you are planning on using a monitor with a 120+HZ refresh rate the R9 290 is not the card for you, that being said it is very playable at 60HZ which most 1440p monitors will be at. We will say that the mainstream system is very playable at these settings while the budget i5 suffers from slight jitter and input delay due to the lower frame rate.
GTA V 1080P Ultra
We see a bit more of the same here as the systems with the GTX 970 take a clear lead, and our lower clocked i5 trails by about 20% behind its overclocked partner.
GTA V 1080P High
Here we add the “Recommended” System as well as the Upgraded Budget Gamer variant.
We can see our Mainstream system powered by the R9 290 loses to the Hybrid system by about 20%, that being said our AMD Card is currently $100 cheaper on Amazon right now. We also see the Recommend system very much unplayable with massive frame drops and input delay. Our Upgraded Budget Gamer build powered by a 1GB GTX 750 and an i5 4690K doesn’t do much better, and we would recommend playing both with settings as many advanced and unnecessary settings turned off.
GTA V 1080P Medium
Here we see our recommended system being a bit closer to playable, again at medium we’d recommend shutting down any more advanced settings, it seems the GPU is the bottleneck here, but we can’t be entirely sure. The GTX 970 i5 system once again pulls ahead never dropping below 63, our mainstream build keeps a respectable 49 FPS as well. The budget gamer powered by a overclocked Pentium dual core just can’t keep up, giving a dismal 5 FPS, and sat at below 20 most of the run, this is completely unacceptable, we can see in the upgraded budget gamer system, the same GTX 750 is totally playable with only a upgraded CPU that has been overclocked.
GTA V 1080P Low
Finally we can see at low settings the Pentium dual core powered budget gamer is still below what we would consider playable, The Recommended system plays very well despite a few isolated drops here and there, it feels rather smooth.
The mainstream blows away everything else, and the upgraded budget gamer shows that the budget system is bottlenecked by the CPU, so those looking to run this game well may want to upgrade to a i5 to truly run this game well.
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL WORDS
So today we’ve ran a bevy of tests, and these are the constant things we’ve noted. The game uses 6-8 threads well, while the clock speed plays a huge role in performance, shown by the locked i5 4430’s dismal performance compared to its overclocked brother. AMD’s 290 seems to be about 20% slower than the Nvidia GTX 970 at current time of testing. With current prices of AMDs R9 290 being as low as $260 on Amazon, its a solid contender for a great GPU for this game. We are unsure if the performance of the Recommended system was a fault of the CPU or GPU bottlenecking the game, we would love to do additional testing to resolve this, but we had limited time with this system, we hope to work with AMD in the future to better represent their hardware from now on.