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.

Gaming Tests: Gears Tactics Gaming Tests: Red Dead Redemption 2
Comments Locked

339 Comments

View All Comments

  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link

    There is no x590 chipset coming. X570 is ryzen 5000s chipset.

    There's also this miracle fo technology, if you have a micro atx or full atx board, you can put in ADD IN CARDS. Amazing, right? So even if your board does not natively support 2.5G LAN you can add it for a low price, because 2.5G cards are relatively cheap.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link

    the x570 aorus master and msi x570 unify also have 2.5G lan. And surely there will be newer models next year with newer features and names, gotta keep the model churn going!
  • alhopper - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Ian and Andrei - 1,000 Thank Yous for this awesome article and you fine technical journalism. You guys did amazing work and we (the community) are fortunate to be the benefactors.
    Thanks again and keep up the Good Work (TM).
  • Rekaputra - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Wow this article it so comprehensive. Glad i always check anandtech for my reference in computing. I wonder how it stack againt threadripper on database or excel compute workload. I know these are desktop proc. But there is possibility use it for mini workstation for office stuff like accounting and development RDBMS as it is cheaper.
  • SkyBill40 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Once some availability comes back into play... my old and trusty FX 8350 is going to be retired. I've been waiting to rebuild for a long time now and the wait has clearly paid off regardless of how the is the end of the line for AM4 or well Ryzen 4 does next year. I could wait... but nah.
  • jcromano - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link

    I'm in a similar boat. I'm still running an i5-2500k from early 2011 (coming up on ten years, yikes), and I'll build a new rig, probably 5600X, when the processors become available. I fret a bit over whether I should wait for the next socket to arrive before taking the plunge, but given the infrequency with which I upgrade, I think it's likely that the next socket would also be obsolete by the time it mattered.
  • evilpaul666 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    I'd love to see some PS3 emulation testing added.
  • abufrejoval - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    Control flow integrity (or enforcement) seem to be in, and that was for me a major criterion for getting one (5800X scheduled to arrive tomorrow).

    But what about SEV or per-VM-encryption? From the hints I see this seems enabled in Intel's Tiger Lake and I guess the hardware would be there on all Zen 3 chiplets, but is AMD going to enable it for "consumer" platforms?

    With 8 or more cores around, there is plenty of reasons why people would want to run a couple of VMs on pretty much anything, from a notebook to a home entertainment/control system, even a gaming rig. And some of those VMs we'd rather have secure from phishing and trojans, right?

    Keeping this an EPIC-only or Pro-only feature would be a real mistake IMHO.

    BTW ordered ECC DDR4-3200 to go with it, because this box will run 24x7 and pushes a Xeon E3-1276 v3 into cold backup.
  • lmcd - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    Starting to feel like the platform is way too constrained just for the sake of all 6 APUs AMD has released (all with mediocre graphics and most with mediocre CPUs, no less). I hope AMD bifuricates and comes up with an in-between platform that supports ~32-40 CPU PCIe lanes and drops APUs. If APUs can't be on-time with everything else there's so little point.
  • 29a - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    "Firstly, because we need an AI benchmark, and a bad one is still better than not having one at all."

    Can't say I agree with that.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now