GTA V

Grand Theft Auto V is an open world, action-adventure video game developed by Rockstar North and published by Rockstar Games. It was released on 17 September 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, on 18 November 2014 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and on 14 April 2015 for Microsoft Windows. The game is the first main entry in the Grand Theft Auto series since 2008’s Grand Theft Auto IV. Set within the fictional state of San Andreas (based on Southern California), the single-player story follows three criminals and their efforts to commit heists while under pressure from a government agency. The open world design lets players freely roam San Andreas, which includes open countryside and the fictional city of Los Santos (based on Los Angeles). Wikipedia

• FXAA – Yes
• MSAA – x8
• V-Sync – No
• Population Density/Variety/Distance Scaling – Max
• Texture Quality/Shader Quality/Shadow Quality/Reflection Quality – Very High
• Reflection MSAA – x8
• Water/Particles/Grass Quality – Very High
• Soft Shadows – Soft
• Post FX – Very High
• Motion Blur Strength – Minimum
• DOF Effects – On
• Anisotropic Filtering – x16
• Ambient Occlusion – High
• Tesselation – Very High
• Long Shadows – On
• High Resolution Shadows – On
• High Detail Streaming while flying – On
• Extended Distance Scaling – Maximum
• Extended Shadows Distance – Maximum
• Frame Scaling – Off

As usual we test at 1080p with the settings essentially maxed out.  At this level of detail GTA thinks it needs over 4 GB of VRAM.  This test should therefore prove difficult for the 960.  At this point we had reduced our inventory of NVidia cards and only had AMD cards to test against.  Both the 7990 and R9-295×2 that we have right now had difficulty with the benchmark.  I.E. they would crash with these settings.  This also happend during the Fury X vs Titan X Triple SLI/CFX showdown review and we ended up playing a level instead.  However that’s really not ideal for the long term.  It’s not obvious why AMD has such a problem with the bench.  The 7990 has always been finicky with GTA if you try and use too much VRAM it simply crashes, while Nvidia cards simply lag gracefully.  The R9-295×2 should have been in the ballpark for the right amount of VRAM so it had no excuse.  This was the same on two different rigs – one with windows 7 and one with windows 8.1.  So as we are having problems it’s only fair to report on them, however that does make our plots look quite empty:

As expected the 960 struggles – however VRAM lagging normally causes FPS in the 2-6 range, so 15-25FPS is surprisingly high.  If we look at the usage charts we some some strange things:

FPS starts off great, but it seems like at some point VRAM limiting occurs and FPS drops down to lag territory.  In addition the GPU usage is surprisingly low.  Single GPUs with low FPS are usually very close to 100% all the time.  This could indicate that the GPU is throttled by something – perhaps caching VRAM in and out for example.  The lag period at the end of the run shows up massively in the frame time charts:

A 99% FPS measurement of 6FPS really bears out the experience you will have trying to max out 1080p.  The simple answer of course is just don’t use this much AA.  The 960 can handle the game very nicely once you do this with average FPS in the 60-90FPS range instead.

For our 4K test we actually turn AA off.  While AA at 4K still makes things look slightly better IMO it just needs too much VRAM for most GPUs to even have a chance of handling.

Again we see both GPUs struggle to handle GTA V at 4k.  While settings could be turned down further I think it’s fair to say that 4K is simply too much for a 960.