What You See Is What You Get: Grand Theft Auto V Edition - IGN India

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Flexibility.

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Flexibility is the freedom to cram a pair of Titan Xs into a micro-ATX case. Or to try maxing out Assassin’s Creed: Unity on integrated graphics, (though to be frank it doesn’t run that much better with a high-end card). It’s about pushing all eight cores of that FX-8350 past 4.0 Ghz and footing absurd power bills. It’s that and a lot of other things. Flexibility is at the heart of what makes PC gaming such a remarkable proposition in this era of locked-down consoles and platform exclusivity. It’s the freedom to do what you want, to buy the hardware you want, and to run what you want.

Flexibility is also perhaps PC gaming’s greatest trade-off. When a title like Grand Theft Auto 5 comes around with over 20 graphics settings on offer, that flexibility can turn into a nightmare. Most people just want to get a game up and running at a solid 30 or 60 FPS and just play. That simplicity has always been what made people turn to consoles. But what if that same flexibility made its way over to PC? What if, in under two minutes, you could configure the exact graphics settings for your card to get a guaranteed frame rate and not have to think twice, instead of hunting through forums and trying to make sense of benchmarks? That’s where IGN India’s What You See is What You Get comes in.

What You See is What You Get is one of the most comprehensive graphics settings analysis on the interwebs. Through exhaustive benchmarking, we get hard numbers—the exact framerate impact of adjusting any particular setting, telling you exactly how far you can push your system, at the integrated graphics, entry level, enthusiast, and high-end tiers. More than mere benchmarks, we also provide you with guaranteed settings configurations—the exact settings for your performance tier, that will give you a rock-solid 30 or 60 FPS.

For this pilot feature, we’ll be limiting ourselves to a GT 750M at stock clocks (equivalent to a 2 GB GTX 650), right in the middle of the entry-level performance envelope. Our results here can be generalised within 10-15 percent accuracy (3-5 FPS) to just about any entry level card, such as the HD 7750, the GTX 650, the GTX 550 Ti and so on. Going ahead, we’ll be featuring integrated, enthusiast, and high-end cards for guaranteed settings at all performance tiers. Without further ado, IGN India’s What You See is What You Get: GTA 5 Edition:

Methodology:

GTA 5 features over 20 configurable graphics settings. We exhaustively benchmarked all of these with entry-level hardware—a GT 750M and an i7 3630QM. The 750M, a GK 107 part, is identical in all respects, including clock rates, to a stock 2 GB GTX 650. The i7 3630QM, clocked lower than desktop i7s, performs on par with mid-range i5s such as the 4460. It is sufficiently powerful to not bottleneck the 750M. Our test platform was outfitted with 8 GB of DDR3 RAM.

As the built-in benchmark for GTA 5 does not show average framerates, we calculated the average framerate across three different benchmark scenes using results from FRAPS.

Recommended Settings:

In order to get a solid 30 or 60 FPS at 720p on entry-level hardware, the following are our recommended settings. No two systems are perfectly alike. If you are getting frame drops with these settings, refer to our per-setting benchmarks further down and adjust to your preference.

Settings for 60 FPS at 1280x720

Setting	Quality
FXAA	On
MSAA	Off
Poplation Density	Maximum
Population Variety	Maximum
Distance Scaling	Maximum
Texture Quality	Very High
Shader Quality	Normal
Shadow Qualiy	High
Reflection Quality	High
Reflection MSAA	Off
Water Quality	High
Particles Quality	High
Grass Quality	High
Soft Shadows	Softest
Post FX	Normal
Motion Blur	Off
In-Game Depth-of-Field Effects	Off
Anisotropic Filtering	X16
Ambient Occlusion	Normal
Tessellation	Normal
Enhanced Distance Scaling	Off
High Resolution Shadows	Off
High Detail Streaming While Flying	Off
Long Shadows	Off

Settings for 30 FPS at 1280x720

Setting	Quality
FXAA	On
MSAA	Off
Poplation Density	Maximum
Population Variety	Maximum
Distance Scaling	Maximum
Texture Quality	Very High
Shader Quality	High
Shadow Qualiy	High
Reflection Quality	Very High
Reflection MSAA	Off
Water Quality	Very High
Particles Quality	Very High
Grass Quality	High
Soft Shadows	Nvidia PCSS
Post FX	Very High
Motion Blur	Maximum
In-Game Depth-of-Field Effects	On
Anisotropic Filtering	X16
Ambient Occlusion	High
Tessellation	Very High
Enhanced Distance Scaling	Off
High Resolution Shadows	Off
High Detail Streaming While Flying	Off
Long Shadows	Off

Per-Setting Analysis

FXAA: FXAA is a fast, post-process anti-aliasing technique. It has the tendency to blur textures somewhat and it doesn’t get rid of jagged (aliased) edges anywhere near as well as MSAA, but this is an extremely performance-friendly option. We found that, compared to the baseline (with all settings turned as low as possible), enabling FXAA did not result in any loss in framerate. FXAA is, essentially “free” AA.

Bottom line: FXAA has a 0 percent impact on performance. Feel free to enable it.

MSAA: MSAA is the “old-fashioned,” intensive anti-aliasing method. In GTA 5, 4x and 8x MSAA offered far better anti-aliasing than FXAA. However, the performance cost is very high. Enabling 2x MSAA resulted in a 30 FPS drop from the baseline. 4x MSAA resulted in a 45 FPS drop, and with 8x MSAA enabled, the game ran at 30 FPS, less than one third of the baseline.

Bottom line: MSAA has a 32-68 percent impact on performance. If anti-aliasing is an absolute must for you, enable 2x MSAA together with FXAA, then dial back a few other settings. However, we recommend just sticking with FXAA.

TXAA: This is an Nvidia-exclusive anti-aliasing method. The “T” stands for temporal, and TXAA is able to handle anti-aliasing for objects that MSAA can’t cover, including transparent objects like fences. However, in practice, it tends to blur the image much like FXAA. Also, it’s a bit of a performance hog. At 2x, TXAA results in a 35 FPS drop. At 4x, this becomes a drop of 43 FPS.

Bottom line: TXAA has a 37-45 percent impact on performance. Because it tends to blur the image, we recommend sticking to 2x MSAA and FXAA if anti-aliasing is a priority. Otherwise, just stick with FXAA alone.

Population Density: This setting controls the density of NPC characters and vehicles around the player. In our tests, Population Density had a negligible impact on performance: the framerate was not impacted with Population Density set up to 80 percent, and, even at the maximum setting, we experienced a dip of just 2 FPS. In general, Population Density options in most games tend to be CPU-intensive, so if you’re sporting an i3, an FX 6xxx processor or lower, reducing this setting may help with performance. We do not recommend setting Population Density below 50 percent under circumstances, as this has a drastic impact on how the game looks—streets become almost completely empty and devoid of life.

Bottom line: Population Density has a 0-2 percent impact on performance. If using a low-end CPU, this may be magnified slightly. We recommend leaving this at the maximum setting.

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