Gaming: Grand Theft Auto V

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).

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

AnandTech IGP Low Medium High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

Gaming: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan) Gaming: F1 2018
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  • Dizoja86 - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link

    "Intel is going to have to have a shift its design strategy to compete."
  • im.thatoneguy - Tuesday, December 3, 2019 - link

    Any temperature stats? You recommend a good water cooler so it would be helpful to know how the thermaltake ring did under load.
  • cdb000 - Sunday, January 26, 2020 - link

    Seconded!
    In fact, a good write-up on how to cool a 280W CPU that is continuously running flat out.
    My (old, slow) 1950X is cooled by a 280mm AIO and gets to ~61C when run flat out. These new Threadrippers use 55% more power which suggests that a 420mm or 480mm radiator will be required.
  • pvrvideoman - Thursday, December 5, 2019 - link

    Great for AMD! Popular YouTube tech reviewers and others really need to stop saying that AMD has "crushed" Intel. That is just stupid. What they have done is deliver a very powerful, competitively priced product that delivers mostly the same or better performance at different price points. The desktop market is small. It's not making AMD or Intel all that much money. But it is great when companies like Amazon and Google talk about moving forward or transitioning to AMD Epyc line of processors. The enterprise and High Performance Computing contracts are where the real victory lies.
  • tamalero - Tuesday, December 24, 2019 - link

    holy intel apologist batman..
  • alpha754293 - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link

    When are the results from the benchmarking for the AMD Threadripper 3970X going to be on the benchmarking database?

    I tried looking for it just now and couldn't find it listed when I wanted to compare that and the AMD Ryzen 3950X.

    Thanks.
  • lxxxxl - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link

    Is Chromium compilation still on the list of tests?
    And these new Threadrippers are not in Bench database?
  • soultorntech - Monday, December 23, 2019 - link

    People concerned about the price between AMD and Intel HEDT processors need to calculate the per core cost and they will find out that the cost between the HEDT processors are pretty close. Add in the fact that Threadripper has a lot more L3 cache than the 10980XE plus can utilize up to 4 times as much RAM then the price of Threadripper 3 processors are a little easier to justify.
  • stefanbatros - Sunday, December 29, 2019 - link

    Hi everyone,

    I bought a 3970x + a Gigabyte Designare mobo. These will be used in a 4GPU setup for rendering and physics simulations.

    Right now I have to chose between these 2 Ram kits, which are available and at a decent price in my country:
    1. Corsair VENGEANCE® 128GB 3000MHz C16 -750$
    2. G.Skill TridentZ 3000MHz C14 - 981$

    Do you guys think that the C14 Gskill justifies the 200$ dollar difference? Will it be great improvement over the C16?
    I am leaning toward the Vengence more because of price +is in stock in store + it is low profile and it will fit better with the Noctua nh-u14s tr4-sp3.

    Any suggestions will ge appreciated.

    Thanks,
    Stefan
  • InfernusTitan - Friday, January 3, 2020 - link

    A GTX 1080?Not Bottlenecking a 32 Core CPU in any ways??? I know core counts doesnt matter that much but still.

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