Grand Theft Auto

The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.

For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.

 

There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low-end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).

To that end, we run the benchmark at 1920x1080 using an average of Very High on the settings, and also at 4K using High on most of them. We take the average results of four runs, reporting frame rate averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance


1080p

4K

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance


1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance


1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance


1080p

4K

Depending on the CPU, for the most part Threadripper performs near to Ryzen or just below it.

CPU Gaming Performance: Rocket League (1080p, 4K) Power Consumption and Distribution
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  • lefty2 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    except that they haven't
  • Dr. Swag - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    How so? You have the performance numbers, and they gave you power draw numbers...
  • bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Just do a avx512 benchmark and Intel will jump over 300watts , 400watts(overclocked) only from the cpu. (prime95 avx512 benchmark).See der8auer's video "The X299 VRM Disaster (en)"
  • DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    The Chromium build time results are interesting. Anandtech's results have the 1950X only getting 3/4ths of the 7900X's performance. Arstechnica's getting almost equal results on both CPUs, but at 16 compiles per day vs 24 or 32 is seeing significantly worse numbers all around.

    I'm wondering what's different between the two compile benchmarks to see such a large spread.
  • cknobman - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    I think it has a lot to do with the RAM used by Anandtech vs Arstechnica .
    For all the regular benchmarking Anand used DDR4 2400, only the DDR 3200 was used in some overcloking.
    Arstechnica used DDR4 3200 for all benchmarking.
    Everyone already knows how faster DDR4 memory helps the Zen architecture.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    If ram was the determining factor, Ars should be seeing faster build times though not slower ones.
  • carewolf - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Anandtech must have misconfigured something. Building chromium is scales practically linearly. You can move jobs all the way across a slow network and compile on another machine and you still get linear speed-ups with more added cores.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    We're using a late March v56 code base with MSVC.
    Ars is using a newer v62 code base with clang-cl and VC++ linking

    We locked in our versions when we started testing Windows 10 a few months ago.
  • supdawgwtfd - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Maybe drop it then as it is not at all usefull info.
  • Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    I refrained from posting on the previous article, but now I'm quite sure Anand is being paid by Intel. It is not that I argue against the benchmarks, but how it is presented. I was even under the impression that this was an Intel review.

    The previous article was stated as "Introducing Intel's Desktop Processor" Huge marketing research is done on how to market products. By just stating one thing first or in a different way, quite different messages can be conveyed without lying outright.

    By making the "Most Powerful, Most Scalable" Bold, that is what the readers read first, then they read "Desktop Processor" without even reading that is is Intel's. This is how marketing works, so Anand used slanted journalism to favour Intel, yet most people will just not realise it eat it up.

    In this review there are so many slanted journalism problems, it is just sad. If you want, just compare it to other sites reviews. They just omit certain tests and list others at which Intel excel.

    I have lost my respect for Anandtech with these last two articles of them, and I have followed Anandtech since its inception. Sad to see that you are also now bought by Intel, even though I suspected this before. Congratulations for making this so clear!!!

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