[Gamegpu] GTA V PC Benchmark

[ocre]

What are the best settings outside of AA to lower or disable without much detail or quality loss for a 970 at 1080?Just replaced my 720p t.v with a 1080 monitor.Should be here Monday but looking into making adjustments with DSR today.

So far the most obvious things are the advanced setting sliders,both are all to the left.MSAA is off and Grass is Very high.Everything else is pretty much maxed atm.

Thanks to anyone who could give some input

The advanced sliders don't have a large impact on my system. Have you tried using them or did you just automatically turn them off?

As far as DSR, Its to brutal in this game for me, at least at my settings (which is ultra). I have been trying to play with ultra grass, trying many things. I do find the grass looks much better on ultra but I have been putting up with dips. Turning off hyper threading does seem to help for some reason.

Anyway, the point is that everyone is different. What I think is important, what I think is a must, what I enjoy...it is not the same as everyone else. We all have subjective taste. So what is an acceptable trade off to one person just may not be to another. So the best thing here is to find the best settings that work for you. Without DSR, you will be able to run just about ultra, its just the grass that is killer but that won't even be noticed until you reach the outskirts or country. I spent a lot of time tweaking my PC just to run at ultra, but some people won't accept frame rates going into the 40s. In this game, it is not so bad under 60. It is just the sudden dips, ultra grass will do that. Look one direction and the frame rate is high, turn or pan around and a sudden dip. I am actually considering gsync now, so that is how important ultra grass is to me.

Anyway, the absolute best way to figure out what settings do and which are important or which can be turned down is this awesome guide nvidia put together. Your taste and preference is your own, it is subjective. I have never seen a guide so well put together. I would call it epic. There are so many settings and in this guide you can see exactly what each does, from low to ultra. A split screen comparison with a slider in the center. It is interactive where you can pull the slider back and forth and compare the effect of each setting with ease.

To top all that off, this guide also has the performance impact of each setting. This can help you zoom in on the heavy hitters and you can see the real effect of turning down e setting, see if it is something you can live with or not. There are several heavy hitters to choose from. Or you can turn down a number of smaller impacts and let them add up to the performance you are looking achieve.

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/grand-theft-auto-v-pc-graphics-and-performance-guide

 

[destrekor]

Why spend $130 now and $200 later when you can just buy a top shelf i5 now for $230? Better yet, why not just go a 4790 and forget upgrading period? You can't just slap in a new CPU like a new GPU. Plus the CPU and mobo are more or less tied. You yank one, you likely have to yank the other.

I'm not saying it's a wise financial decision, just that it is possible.


And no, you missed the point of my post: if you get a Haswell i3 with a motherboard that has a matching chipset, you can then later "upgrade" to the top CPU that is compatible with that chipset. It won't be something that's released in two years, it'll probably have been around at the time you bought your i3 or may have been released half a year later, but it'll be fully compatible and a major upgrade.

Sometimes, people might feel it's better to put their money where they can, and once they can afford the better parts, they'll upgrade at that point, instead of waiting until they could afford what they truly wanted in the first place. People go about things differently.

 

[crashtech]

Regardless of the hate for the i3, look at the difference in minimums between the 2C/2T G3258 and any 2C/4T i3. The current iteration of HT makes excellent use of limited resources, making the game very playable for those who don't require 60+ minimums.

 

[escrow4]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-best-pc-hardware-for-grand-theft-auto-5

Oooo yes, 5960X in use, V can and does scale across the cores and threads. You clock that 5960X to 3.5Ghz via MCE and it will come very close to matching the 4790K @ 4.4GHz.

 

[Spjut]

Regardless of the hate for the i3, look at the difference in minimums between the 2C/2T G3258 and any 2C/4T i3. The current iteration of HT makes excellent use of limited resources, making the game very playable for those who don't require 60+ minimums.

I'd like to see what benefit hyperthreading brings on the first generation of i7 processors as well.
i7 with hyperthreading enabled was sometimes shown to give a noticeable performance hit for games, but that could simply be because very few games back then even scaled to four cores/threads, let alone eight.

 

[crashtech]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-best-pc-hardware-for-grand-theft-auto-5

Oooo yes, 5960X in use, V can and does scale across the cores and threads. You clock that 5960X to 3.5Ghz via MCE and it will come very close to matching the 4790K @ 4.4GHz.

What I would like to know is why the 4790K and the 5960X both exhibit lower minimums than the i5. The 5960 result is perhaps understandable because of the lower clocks, but the 4790 shouldn't be slower unless there is some kind of problem with HT.

 

[RussianSensation]

Regardless of the hate for the i3, look at the difference in minimums between the 2C/2T G3258 and any 2C/4T i3. The current iteration of HT makes excellent use of limited resources, making the game very playable for those who don't require 60+ minimums.

Minimums? Ha! i3 gets 28 fps minimums with a Titan X on max settings. That means an i3 is already a bottleneck in GTA V. Who wants to buy a 2015 gaming rig knowing that when it comes time to upgrade their GPU in 2-3 years, their main platform is already outdated and they require an i5?

Sorry, but an i3 is outdated on day 1 of purchase for AAA / high end gaming:

i3 4130 + Titan X ($1000 GPU) = 42.4 avg

vs.

i7 4790K + GTX970 ($320 GPU) = 60.8 avg
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-the-best-pc-hardware-for-grand-theft-auto-5

The i3 only makes sense if you:

1) Will never play modern AAA games in the next 5+ years.
2) Have no desire to ever upgrade your GPU beyond GTX750Ti/GTX670 level.
3) Are OK with 30 fps minimums and 40-45 fps averages at reduced settings.
4) Are an occasional gamer who is ok playing at Medium settings/console like settings.
5) If you have no budget to get an i5/i7 today*

* this strategy could work well if you resell the i3 and pick up a used i7 4770K/4790K in 2-3 years when they are no longer hip.

6) Know for sure that the games you will play will hardly benefit from a Core i5/i7. For example, in LoL or DOTA 2, you don't need an i7 4790K.

What makes the i3 a questionable decision for a PC gamer, not a PC user, is that over the course of 3-5 years of ownership, the cost of PC gaming software is so high, it'll dwarf the $60-80 savings of not getting the i5. Pretty much a single purchase of a new AAA game with DLC wipes out the entire difference - just 1 game! For example, Batman Arkham Knight with Season Pass is basically $100. Since we are discussing i3 vs. i5 in GTA V, someone playing GTA V already spend a minimum of $40 USD for the PC. That right there is half the price difference between an i3 and an i5. 1 more game and we have broken even but he i3 is forever a bottleneck. Makes little sense to get the i3 if you buy new videogames regularly.

There are 2 other things that make i3 a horrible buy:

1) Worse value than an i5 over time. For example, January 2011 bought i5 2500K @ 4.5Ghz is still faster than any i3 released today. Skylake i3 won't outperform 2500K @ 4.5Ghz which means add another 2 years easily. Now we are at August 2017 and an i3 has not beaten an i5 2500K from Jan 2011. While the upfront cost is more, over time it costs less to own an overclocked i5 K series than to buy an i3 and upgrade again to an i3. Just to put things into perspective, no i3 today can outperform an overclocked i7 920/860 @ 4.0Ghz in games and those CPUs are 6-7 years old! With DX12, an i5 should pull away even more from an i3.

2) Total system cost - context. People don't generally upgrade to an i3, they buy new parts/system with an i3 in it. That means, the real comparison for i3 vs. i5 is cost of the new parts/system vs. price/performance.

If one is to compare an i3 system for $500-600 vs. an i5 system for $580-680, all of a sudden that i3 looks like a bad value again.

If someone wanted a budget system for every day tasks and light gaming, the 3258 OC makes more sense than the i3.

 

[SimianR]

I would argue that the i5 is the sweet spot and often times the i7 is overkill. Obviously not when paired with a Titan X, but I find it odd seeing systems where gaming is the focus and people pair an i7 with a Geforce 960 or other budget/mid range GPU. You're going to see a bigger increase going with an i5 and getting a higher end GPU.

 

[crashtech]

(snip)

If someone wanted a budget system for every day tasks and light gaming, the 3258 OC makes more sense than the i3.

Guess you missed the part where the G3258 posted single-digit minimums. This all-or-nothing crap is sure getting predictable with you characters. It's very obvious you have no real experience with the parts you disparage, else there would be a bit more temperance in your overly verbose post.

 

[crashtech]

BTW, I just want to remind everyone that there is no need to use super glue to install a CPU, that way you can pull it out and replace it with a different one later. In fact, upgrading is a big part of the PC's allure, there's lots of options and builds for every budget.

 

[destrekor]

BTW, I just want to remind everyone that there is no need to use super glue to install a CPU, that way you can pull it out and replace it with a different one later. In fact, upgrading is a big part of the PC's allure, there's lots of options and builds for every budget.

Yeah, but that's really only an option if you don't buy one of the top end CPUs at any given time.

My upgrade cycle has always meant a need to upgrade the motherboard, because either the socket has changed, or the chipset for a given generation doesn't support the latest generation of CPUs.

But, I see zero incentive to upgrade a CPU after only a year or two, when sometimes a chipset might still support a new offering. The performance gains are a pittance unless you started at the low end.

 

[crashtech]

Yeah, but that's really only an option if you don't buy one of the top end CPUs at any given time.

My upgrade cycle has always meant a need to upgrade the motherboard, because either the socket has changed, or the chipset for a given generation doesn't support the latest generation of CPUs.

But, I see zero incentive to upgrade a CPU after only a year or two, when sometimes a chipset might still support a new offering. The performance gains are a pittance unless you started at the low end.

I don't think most people buy high end, but maybe it depends on your neighborhood, so to speak. Many of the participants here are so affluent it must be difficult to conceive of actually needing to stay within a certain budget.

 

[RussianSensation]

I would argue that the i5 is the sweet spot and often times the i7 is overkill. Obviously not when paired with a Titan X, but I find it odd seeing systems where gaming is the focus and people pair an i7 with a Geforce 960 or other budget/mid range GPU. You're going to see a bigger increase going with an i5 and getting a higher end GPU.

True.

Guess you missed the part where the G3258 posted single-digit minimums. This all-or-nothing crap is sure getting predictable with you characters. It's very obvious you have no real experience with the parts you disparage, else there would be a bit more temperance in your overly verbose post.

Even if I were wrong about 3258 OC specifically for GTA V, you didn't address any of my other points. It sounds like you are an i3 owner and have vested interest in defending it. I've been building PCs for nearly 2 decades. I don't need to waste money on an i3 and actually use it to be right about the fact that owning a Core i5/i7 Nehalem or even i5 2500K OC costs less long-term than buying an i3 system and upgrading again to an i3/i5. Again, you didn't address how an i3 already bottlenecks cards like R9 270X so what exactly do you propose pairing with an i3? A 750Ti? And then in 2-3 years what card will you upgrade to? See, you keep calling out the quad-core police but when you they do show up, you have no strong arguments to justify your position other than to say "Well you haven't used an i3, so your opinion isn't valid."

Your arguments remind me of all those gamers who would defend their purchases of Core 2 Duo E8400-8600 when they couldn't see that the future back then was already heading to Quads. Today, a Q9550 @ 3.8Ghz is still pretty good for gaming but no C2D is.

I don't think most people buy high end, but maybe it depends on your neighborhood, so to speak. Many of the participants here are so affluent it must be difficult to conceive of actually needing to stay within a certain budget.

No offense, but if you can't afford $60-80 extra over an i3 to an i5 over 5 years of ownership, how are you a PC gamer who purchases legitimate PC games? As I mentioned earlier, people get an i3 from the get go with a new system so they should assess the total system cost not just $120 i3 vs. $180 i5. Therefore, that $60 extra means you no longer need to buy a card like 750Ti but you can get the R9 270/270X that provide 30/43% more performance when are paired with an i5. All of a sudden, that $60 extra actually allows one to get a way faster system right away, and it's not just "$60-80" to future-proof in 2-3 years from now when you might benefit from an i5. You benefit from an i5 right away from day 1 with a similarly priced GPU. You don't want to talk about this point though because it undermines your viewpoint. The i5 strategy means not needing to gimp your gaming rig to a slow 750Ti card and having the ability to step up to a much faster card for nearly the same price such as a 270/270X or even a $150 R9 280 that's 60% faster than the 750Ti!

I've lived in countries where the average salary is $300-500 a month and even if I would explain the concept of long-term value, my friends would save $60-80 to get an i5 because they would quickly realize that over the course of 5 years, it would cost them LESS long-term. So this idea of sticking to the budget is an accounting concept but the true economic / financial cost is what matters for a long-term value thinker. If someone truly is a budget gamer, they do not buy a $200 GTX960 and then in 2 years buy another x60 card for $200 when $240 R9 290 gives you that level of performance right away 2 years in advance (and it actually costs less over 4 years to go this route). Similarly, a budget gamer doesn't buy an i3 and then in 2-3 years buys another i3. That's not a budget gamer but someone who doesn't understand what economic cost is and the financial concept of total cost of ownership. Essentially getting an i3 now ends up costing you more long-term which financially speaking defeats the purpose of trying to save $ on the i3 now.

You live in United States for crying out loud. A country where a person working at McDs with a minimum wage can save $60-80 over 2-3 months, surely. You can't afford to spend $60-80 to get double the CPU cores and pair it with a GPU 40% faster right away to use something for 5 years? I am shocked.

BTW, I just want to remind everyone that there is no need to use super glue to install a CPU, that way you can pull it out and replace it with a different one later.

This used to work well during the old days of Athlon XP/Pentium R and Athlon 64/X2 pricing. Back then CPUs advanced so fast, that your strategy you described was excellent. Today, it hardly works.

Core i3-4160 = $120
Core i5-4670K = $240

How much money do you think you can save if you resell an i3 in 3 years and buy a used i5-4670K/4770K? If you sell that i3 in 3 years, how much is it worth $60? You ignored the point how a 6-year-old i5 750 @ 4.0Ghz is still faster than any i3 and how an i5 2500K @ 4.5Ghz will beat any dual-core i3 even released in 2016-2017.

 

[crashtech]

I'm not invested enough in the argument to produce walls of text in order to refute a two sentence post, nor do I have anything to prove by claiming how long I've been building PCs. Suffice it to say I was no stranger to installing DOS with floppy disks, OK? The benchmarks speak for themselves. For someone who is not a hardcore gamer, the i3 is still a more than adequate solution in nearly all instances. For a dedicated gaming rig? NO! But one size need not fit all.

I have a 4790K, btw, but my wife runs an i3 and I have built and personally benchmarked many.

 

[RussianSensation]

I have a 4790K, btw, but my wife runs an i3 and I have built and personally benchmarked many.

Right....so you just proved the same thing almost everyone on our forum calls out -- people always talk about how an i3 is good enough but they never buy one for themselves for gaming, yet they defend the i3. Also, you didn't explain how buying a used i5/i7 from older generation isn't better than the i3 your wife has. I sold my i7 860 @ 3.9Ghz 100% bullet-proof stable to a girl student in university back in 2011. In May of 2015 your wife's i3 is worse than that 4.5 year old CPU. What you are saying is an i3 is good enough for a casual PC gamer who doesn't know much about tech and isn't willing to research. Nothing wrong with that as millions of people buy i3s at BestBuy but this is AT forum so you should expect a different level of tech knowledge. It's like going on a car forum and telling someone a 2015 BMW 328i is good enough when you can buy a used BMW M3 for that money. We get it that an i3 fits your wife's needs but forums like ours think outside the box - and there are countless options that provide better value than an i3. AT is an enthusiast PC forum and hence it serves its function as one.

 

[TheELF]

RussianSensation
The only games where you can see a difference between i3 and i5 are games that use more than 85-90% of the quad,so what do you expect to happen in 4-5 years?
Games will magically start to use more then 100% of the quad?
Worst case scenario every game will be using a high percentage of a quad(we hear this happening since 2006)and every game will have the difference you see today,but not more.
Reality, dx12 will get rid of one thread giving hyperthreading a chance to work better.
We already see this with mantle.

 

[crashtech]

A Haswell i3 will play GTA V well enough to exceed modern console image quality and frame rate standards, as well as having ST performance that will make old Nehalems look hot, tired, and power hungry.

Of course an i5 will perform better, but an i3 can be a rational choice for those who know what they are getting. Even though I am an enthusiast, it's not my style to try and ram choices down people's throats.

Anyway, all I really wanted to point out in this thread is the rather stunning difference between 2C/2T and 2C/4T Haswells in the GTA V benchmarks. It's interesting that we rarely if ever see this kind of delta between 4C/4T and 4C/8T.

 

[ocre]

A Haswell i3 will play GTA V well enough to exceed modern console image quality and frame rate standards, as well as having ST performance that will make old Nehalems look hot, tired, and power hungry.

Of course an i5 will perform better, but an i3 can be a rational choice for those who know what they are getting. Even though I am an enthusiast, it's not my style to try and ram choices down people's throats.

Anyway, all I really wanted to point out in this thread is the rather stunning difference between 2C/2T and 2C/4T Haswells in the GTA V benchmarks. It's interesting that we rarely if ever see this kind of delta between 4C/4T and 4C/8T.

I find it interesting. Thanks for your input.

I want to address my opinion on your earlier point. Why an i5 has higher min fps. I believe it to be latency. Hyper threading for all its glory, it does have drawbacks. 2 threads per core is and never will be as good as 2 real cores. But hyper threading is a pretty amassing solution. In predictable scenarios, the total throughput is remarkable. Anytime you totally overwhelm and saturate the cores, turning on hyper threading can bring you some impressive gains. But there is added latency with hyper threading on, it does have a negative impact that is often out shined by doing the work across two threads.

in gta5 we see that the game can really be brutal across 4 cores. It can overwhelm a quad core, and it completely overwhelms dual cores. Hyper threading improves performance but it is not so simple.
With haswell E, there are sites showing a performance hit with hyper threading. It is clear and it is real. How can something that helps on the low end hurt on the high end?

Gta 5 has a lot going on and is very well threaded. I find a much smoother gaming experience turning off hyper threading on my 6core CPU. There were issues going into the country or outskirts as a result of ultra grass settings. Also, as smooth as the game was, there were micro stutters here and there. I know everyone experienced them randomly while wrecking thru the world. Anyway, turning hyper threading off only gives me a small bump in fps. Like just a couple, but the game is smoother everywhere. Ultra grass is still brutal and can take me in the 40s....but it is much smoother.

I have heard a few people claim that the game runs better with HT off on their ivy 6core, I have seen reviews showing this with haswell E. But from my personal experience with an even older 6core chip, I am ready to call it.

Its not so much the frame rate, that improvement is small. But the game is smoother all the way around with hyper threading off on a six core. Anyone out there reading this, if you have at least 6cores, try it and see.

I would like to see frame times between a 4c/8t haswell and a 4c/4t. It would be great to see. 4 cores may benefit enough from HT that it is better with it on. But on my 6 core CPU, it is clear that hyper threading is having a negative effect. It is not night and day, but if you go to areas where frame rates struggle, you will see a difference. You will see HT latency at play as the work tries to divide up across 12 threads.

 

[skipsneeky2]

My cousin wants to upgrade his 1gb gtx650.$114 GTX750 TI or something like a CX430 and a 370 seem about right for his budget.

He has a i3 3220 and games at 1366x768. Newer reviews often times leave out the 750 TI especially in these 370 reviews.

 

[crashtech]

@ocre, sorry I missed your good post. Hyperthreading has been of debatable usefulness in games for a long time now, and I believe it has to do with the variable nature of the load. On a partially loaded CPU, if an HT "virtual core" is selected to execute code instead of a "real" core, performance will be impacted negatively. But once the load increases to the point where all cores are saturated, it doesn't make any difference which type of core is selected, since all the work is waiting for a turn. That would explain why i3s seem to make better use of HT in the real world, because they are closer to full load more often than an i7. Yet i7s can make really good use of the extra resources in a heavily multithreaded scenario like transcoding or rendering.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Ya, and a lot of gamers still buy i3s and recommend them. The CPU is a dog. Interesting how i5 keeps up until the bench goes on the ground. There the i7s start to pull away and especially the minimum frames on the 5960X skyrocket over the i5 4690K. Makes me want to get 6-core Skylake-E.

It's pretty hilarious how irrational the gamer crowd choose their CPUs. 8 years ago when you can do a massive >50% OC with a Conroe E6300 some would rather save $150 to OC an A64 X2 which can't even beat a stock E6300. Now, OCing a 4690K which can barely edge past a stock 4790K without the advantage of HT it's still heralded as second coming of Christ. :lol:

 

[ocre]

@ocre, sorry I missed your good post. Hyperthreading has been of debatable usefulness in games for a long time now, and I believe it has to do with the variable nature of the load. On a partially loaded CPU, if an HT "virtual core" is selected to execute code instead of a "real" core, performance will be impacted negatively. But once the load increases to the point where all cores are saturated, it doesn't make any difference which type of core is selected, since all the work is waiting for a turn. That would explain why i3s seem to make better use of HT in the real world, because they are closer to full load more often than an i7. Yet i7s can make really good use of the extra resources in a heavily multithreaded scenario like transcoding or rendering.

Yes.
In a very predictable environment, one that can be broken down into multiple threads, hyperthreading shines very bright.

Unpredictable and/or variable work loads, it could actually have a negative effect. The more saturated the cores become in those environments, they are actually being overwhelmed. The added latency of hyperthreading is lost in the ability to spread the work across other threads.

Hyperthreading will never be free. There is a point where spreading the load makes up for the latency

here is a great read and touches on the subject

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/performance-insights-to-intel-hyper-threading-technology

These are some issues when it comes to gaming loads:

• Thread imbalance. The increased parallelism is only as useful as the degree of concurrency of the workload. If the work happens on only a few threads, then the increased hardware parallelism will provide little or no performance benefit. Intel® Software Development Products include tools to diagnose thread imbalance and improve concurrency.
• Parallellism bottlenecks. There are many parallelism barriers that can limit thread scaling, such as false sharing, too many locks/synchronization, small parallel region compared to serial region, etc. Some barriers such as the amount of work (and thus the amount of work per thread) may be difficult or impossible to change, but other barriers such as false sharing can be fixed.

Intel mostly talks about hyperthreading specifically in cases with 100% CPU load. Home PCs rarely stay in those conditions. But even still, they recognize that high latency conditions can have a negative impact even with 100% CPU load.

 

[crashtech]

OS schedulers are getting smarter, but I don't know if they can yet differentiate between a core and a logical core. I'm thinking not.

 

[Nhirlathothep]

terrible post here!

a lot of uninformed pple on a tech forum.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


[4 core ht off] 46,5

[4 core ht on] 56,1

[6 core ht off] 64,8

[6 core ht on] 74,9

 

[frozentundra123456]

Is that crysis 3? If so hyperthreading has been proven to be a good benefit in that game. That wont necessarily hold true in other games, even well threaded ones.

I guess the thing about some recent posts that bother me, is that some posters seem to be wanting to impose their very high standards for PC gaming on everyone. To me 30FPS min, mid 40s average is acceptable. I think a pentium is a bad choice, but if someone wants to live with an i3 and its limitations in a few games, I dont think we should try to force quad cores down their throats. Now would I buy an i3 for gaming? No, but I do think for midrange it is still acceptable. Even the two worst case games, W3 and GTA V get 40 fps minumum.

Edit: I do agree though that the i3 is somewhat overpriced compared to i5 on the higher end and celerons and pentiums for a cheap consumer box.