Today's Hard|Forum Post
Today's Hard|Forum Post
Date:
Monday , May 18, 2015
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Grand Theft Auto V Shadow Features Performance - Part 4

In Part 4 of our on-going Grand Theft Auto V evaluation we will look at shadow performance. Soft shadows, High Resolution Shadows, and Extended Shadow performance will be tested. We will also look into CPU utilization when running GeForce TITAN X SLI at 1440p and 4K.

Introduction

We are nearing the end of our very detailed and in-depth look into the new game Grand Theft Auto V. We have covered a lot recently, so check below for any parts of this series you have missed.

We will be continuing with a Part 5 that will delve into actual image quality of all these features as this article was getting quite large in scope.

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Starting from the top, here are out previous evaluations centered around GTA V performance.

Grand Theft Auto V Video Card Performance Preview - Start your reading here, this summarizes the in-game graphics options and preliminary feature testing.

Grand Theft Auto V Single GPU Performance Review Part 1 - Continue here where we dive into single-GPU performance and find out what settings are best playable on a lot of video cards.

Grand Theft Auto V Multi-GPU Performance Review Part 2 - Here we dive into multi-GPU performance and find what is playable with SLI and CrossFire and 4K resolutions.

Grand Theft Auto V IQ Features Performance - Part 3 - In Part 3 we dove in deep in specific feature performance comparisons. We found out how intense MSAA, Reflection MSAA, and TXAA are including the VRAM impact. Then we looked at grass performance, tessellation performance, and extended view distance performance.

We are nearing in the end, in this next to the last chapter we are going to cover shadow performance in-depth and some CPU utilization testing with TITAN X SLI.

In our final part to come we will cover image quality in a stand-alone article.

There are many shadow settings this game supports. In total there are five, yes five distinct shadow options that change the quality of the shadows in this game. With so many possible combinations of settings via these five settings it is impossible for us to cover every permutation. Therefore, we will focus on the common popular settings that impact visual quality the most.

We are going to leave the "Shadow Quality" option in the graphics settings at "Very High" for all of these tests. There shouldn't be any reason you need to degrade the quality of this setting for performance. There are other settings like Soft Shadows that will affect performance more.

The "Soft Shadows" option is one we will be testing today in the forms of "Softest" versus "AMD CHS" versus "NVIDIA PCSS" performance. We will also be looking at the "High Resolution Shadows" option under the advanced settings to find out the burden of this setting on performance. Finally, we will also enable "Long Shadows" and "Extended Shadows Distance" to find the impact of those options.

Finally, we will see if TITAN X SLI is being CPU limited, or not.

Test Setup

For this evaluation today we are going to use a GeForce GTX 980 and XFX Radeon R9 290X Double Dissipation video card for evaluation. Both video cards run at the stock reference clock speeds for each GPU.

We will focus on these in-game settings in the game: Soft Shadows, Extended Shadow Distance, and High Resolution Shadows.

We are using the latest drivers, Catalyst 15.4 Beta, and GeForce 350.12. We are also running the latest build of the game, Build 350.

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