GTA V – The Way It’s Meant to Be Played – 4K and Nvidia Shield

Performance

4K Performance

This is a tricky one to nail down right now, while the game is very well optimized for PC, at least when you consider the blundering mess that was GTA IV when it launched years ago. However, there’s still quite a few bugs causing benchmarking issues and the current wave of drivers appear to need some revising until things are running smoothly. Still, I’ve managed to find a range of settings I am happy with for this setup.

With everything dialled up to high or very high (where applicable), using Maxwell exclusive MFAA, given that we’re running at 4K, anti-aliasing techniques are virtually irrelevant anyway, but MFAA doesn’t put as much strain on the system as MSAA, which would only mince our performance figures to a stuttering mess, at least with a single GPU configuration and only 4GB of VRAM. Even at 4K I managed to maintain 45FPS in real world gameplay. While there were some dips down to the low 20’s, they didn’t appear often enough to be of concern in real-world gameplay. However, the benchmark tool is more demanding on the hardware and still a little buggy, producing results around 80FPS in mosts test, but typically further testing revealed similar results to our real world gameplay. A few tweaks on things such as shadows, DoF, grass detail helped get this figure close to 60FPS, still almost double of the console release of GTA V at the cost of some advanced graphics settings.

Nvidia Shield Performance

This one is a little different, as I only need the game to run at 1080p resolution for the game stream, I decided we can max everything out and I mean literally everything. All settings were at max, including MSAA, AF, DoF, all of them. This resulted in the game looking drop dead gorgeous, although not as eye-candy like as the very high settings did at 4K, as the drop in pixel count does bring down the fidelity considerably, or at least it does to my eyes, which have been spoilt with 4K for a while now.

However, when streaming to the screen of the tablet, seeing the gameplay on a mobile device with ultra graphics and rendering-side frame rates were sometimes north of 100FPS, which is really something to behold. Frame rates were maxing out at 134FPS in the benchmark, although that is still a little glitchy and not the best indication of real-world performance at this time. I was averaging 62FPS with actual gameplay recorded using Fraps, which is more than enough to give us the steady 60FPS streaming output to the Nvidia Shield.

Playing GTA V on the tablet while laid in bed, or slouching on the couch is great, but it’s not the Shields biggest party trick. Hook up an HDMI cable from the tablet to the Shield, put it in Console Mode and boom! You’ve got 1080p 60FPS GTA V on the big screen. Much better than consoles, although admittedly with a fair bit more cost to consider; worth every penny though.

General Performance

I don’t feel the need to dive too much into the performance of GTA V. This is something we’ve already covered in detail in our GPU Performance Review for GTA V. I was simply looking for settings to give me good 4K performance and excellent 1080p performance, with an average target of around 60FPS at the highest possible settings, which is something I’m happy to have achieved with relative ease.