Gaming Tests: GTA 5

The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA to help optimize the title. At this point GTA V is super old, but still super useful as a benchmark – it is a complicated test with many features that modern titles today still struggle with. With rumors of a GTA 6 on the horizon, I hope Rockstar make that benchmark as easy to use as this one is.

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.

We are using the following settings:

  • 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max

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. The benchmark can also be called from the command line, making it very easy to use.

There is one funny caveat with GTA. If the CPU is too slow, or has too few cores, the benchmark loads, but it doesn’t have enough time to put items in the correct position. As a result, for example when running our single core Sandy Bridge system, the jet ends up stuck at the middle of an intersection causing a traffic jam. Unfortunately this means the benchmark never ends, but still amusing.

AnandTech Low Resolution
Low Quality
Medium Resolution
Low Quality
High Resolution
Low Quality
Medium Resolution
Max Quality
Average FPS
95th Percentile

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

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  • Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    No, that's me
  • yeeeeman - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Ian, you need to buy some new servers for anandtech.com now that AMD has launched zen 3.
    The site is barely loading.
  • DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    I wonder if they're still running on the last hardware upgrade Anand did.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Nah, we're a couple of generations past that now.
  • Phiro69 - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    As far as I can tell, it's cloudfront having problems, not Anandtech's backend. I would be surprised if they aren't 100% cloud based at this point, too.
  • gagegfg - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    This is what I expected from AMD, 10 years but it came !!
  • gagegfg - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    Athlon 64 X2 2005 = 15 años
  • Tomatotech - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    15 anuses? Surely it’s not *that* bad ;)
  • ahenriquedsj - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    In competitive games it is a massacre.
  • Double Trouble - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    What AMD has been able to achieve over the past few years is definitely impressive, and this 5000 series CPU set is excellent. However, I do wonder if climbing up the price / segment chart is going to take a toll. For me, I've upgraded 5 PC's from older CPU's to Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X because the price was very reasonable (about $170). With a minimum of $300 for the new 5600X, that's almost double the price, so I won't be buying any for a long time. The 5000 series is impressive, but not worth that kind of a steep price. I wonder if a lot of other buyers might be in the same boat.

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