GTA V PC Review – The Definitive Edition

GRAPHICS AND PERFORMANCE

TEST BENCH

Taking a peak at the graphics settings we can see a bevy of graphical options and among them are multiple anti-aliasing methods, including the shader-based FXAA, which can be used in conjunction with MSAA up to x8, and NVIDIA TXAA, which of course is only available to those using compatible NVIDIA GeForce graphics card. Among that we have our sliders like

Population Density: basically defines the number of random NPC characters  and vehicles rendered on the screen at any given time – This option can impact both CPU and GPU performance heavily as more NPCs means more drawcalls for the CPU, and of course more polygons for the GPU to render.

Population Variety: This is still open to speculation at this point, but it seems this option defines how many individual characters or vehicles are rendered before re-using the same models or objects. We noticed it has a small impact on frame rate in our experience on the AMD XFX R9 290 DD

Distance Scaling: This affects the player’s view distance in-game. Increasing this will allow the player to see objects clearer, at greater distances. This seems to have a large impact on frame rate on cards with lower frame buffers and lower bitrates.

For the other important settings we have:

Texture Quality: this ranges from ‘Normal’, ‘High‘, and ‘Very High’: This can impact GPU VRAM usage immensely, so if you’re having performance issues related to VRAM allocation turning this setting down can free up loads of it. Of course, that will come at the cost of texture resolution.

In-Game Depth of Field Effects: This enables a filter which applies to various objects and buildings at varying levels of depth in the game. This will impact GPU performance significantly, if you are having frame rate issues this is one of the first things you should look at lowering or turning off all-together. We Personally recommend turning it off since it is a nice effect but somewhat unnecessary.

Tessellation: This gives terrain and water increased detail, allowing for much more realistic canyons, rock formations, waves, etc. It can be very GPU intensive and should be lowered on lower-end Nvidia GPUs and most AMD GPUs.

Since the game was released on last gen consoles almost 2 years ago, there is some evidence of it in this game. That being said the developer put metric ton of work into the assets and making this game look as good as it possibly can.

The character models look fantastic and the animations are very realistic, possibly the best we’ve seen in a video game. The character models look very detailed, things like facial expressions, jewelry and clothing show detail fantastically.

The shadows are much improved over the PS4/Xbox One versions with tons of options.  Such as some Post Processing Anti Aliasing, Lens flare, Bloom and light shafts among other things , and the water isn’t too shabby either.

One thing that totally blew us away is how AMAZING the rain looks and the way it puddles on the ground.

We were shocked at how many times we found ourselves staring out into the ocean or at the mountains, this game is not easy to run on high settings but it is definitely one of that games that makes you justify your expensive PC hardware.

Luckily Pop-in isn’t ANYWHERE near being the issue it was in its predecessor and in Watch Dogs.