My GTA 5 Graphics settings & Nvidia Control Recommendation

I would like to share with you my recommendation on graphics related settings. You will see me writing about Nvidia and not AMD as I’m fan of Nvidia and I never had AMD so I can not speak anything about it’s settings at all. I will start with my in-game settings recommendations in same order as you see them in in-game menu.

GRAPHICS:

Ignore Suggested Limits — definitively On.
DirectX Version — have to be set to DirectX 11 otherwise you will have glitches like square smoke + some functions of our RealismScript can be not working properly either.

Screen Type — best is to try which give you personally best performance but from my experience Windowed Borderless is best for lower screens while Full Screen is better for screens with bigger refresh rate as windowed may limit your refresh rate causing lower fps.
Resolution — up on you, note that the biggest resolution you have, less FPS you have. So for users with 2K+ screens if you use heavy ENB presets or other mods like that which eat lot of FPS and you want rather boost FPS than get some ultra details which you during casual gameplay don’t recognize so much to ruin your gaming experience anyway, use only full HD resolution.
Aspect Ratio — up on you, I personally use simply Auto.
Refresh Rate — no reason to limit it so I would use Auto.

FXAA — based on your preference, should have no performance affect, I personally have it On.
MSAA — this is big FPS eater but it make game look really much better, so my recommendation is don’t turn it off but at the same time keep it lowest possible to don’t consume much FPS = X2.
NVIDIA TXAA — I don’t really see any difference on this and with MSAA on and even FXAA on as I have, it’s totally useless and I would leave it Off. Maybe if you have very low hardware and you have FXAA & MSAA off, then you may consider turning at least this On.
VSync — basically if you don’t have any screen tearing problems you can leave it Off, but I personally have it On.
Pause Game On Focus Loss — for sure leave it On.

Population Density & Population Variety — if you want less density or variety you can lower it down, but for best experience from gameplay I personally have it maxed.
Distance Scaling — definitively maxed.

Texture Quality— with all optimization and customizations of settings that we did in 2022 you should be able have it on Very High without problem even on build that correspond to build with GTX1660. If you want sacrifice textures quality in whole world around you, by lowering it you can gain lot of performance. If you have very low build like for example our tested Intel Iris integrated graphics card, you definitively want to lower down this to Normal. If you are using lot of additional mods and script and/or even streaming at the same time, you may consider lower it to High based on how good/bad is performance while streaming as playing+recording+uploading at the same time is very harder for your pc than casual playing.
Shader Quality — feel free to max it out on Very High.
Shadow Quality — feel free to max it out on Very high.
Reflection Quality — without testing it I believe this can give you some small performance boost, mostly during rainy weathers, but I personally have it maxed on Very High.
Reflection MSAA — same as previous but a bit more related to performance for sure, however I use X8.
Water Quality — feel free to max it out on Very High.
Particles Quality— feel free to max it out on Very High.
Grass Quality — in general you don’t see big difference in highest settings on this, but with our custom models of vegetation you really don’t see quality difference between highest settings but it affect performance and FPS a lot so with our files definitely make no sense to go any higher than High while using Normal will cause that game don’t load many grass placements details so best experience + performance you’ll get with setting this on High.
Soft Shadows — this pretty much depends on your preferences, you may like sharp or blurred shadows, I personally don’t find ultra sharp shadows much realistic unless they are cascade pixelated and I like more blurred ones. To decide, I would recommend you to watch this video that compare all settings in vanilla game at all

Post FX — As showed on video above you don’t really see much different on highest levels of settings but you can be missing some FX effects by doing that, so I recommend you set it on max.
Motion Blur Strength — based on your preferences, I personally have it turned off = at minimum.
In-Game Depth Of Field Effects — up to you if possible to turn on for you
Anisotropic Filtering — with our files definitely X16 otherwise you may experience yellow roads in distance.
Ambient Occlusion — feel free to max it out on High.
Tessellation — feel free to max it out on Very High.

ADVANCED GRAPHICS:

All these settings in general are based on your performance. If you have very good performance, feel free to turn on whatever you like here, otherwise keep everything turned off.

Long Shadows — I personally have this On with my 3090
High Resolution Shadows — I personally have this On with my 3090
High Detail Streaming While Flying — I personally have this On with my 3090
Extended Distance Scaling — actually for this you could give us feedback in Patrons channel on our Discord what are results of turning this on/off while using our files. I personally with my 3090 have this maxed without having any extra performance drop (definitively not affecting FPS as much as MSAA) and it may help you if you have rendering problems. However feel free to experiment with this and see results that it will make for you.
Extended Shadows Distance — I personally have this On with my 3090
Frame Scaling Mode — I don’t really recommend you enabling this at all and have no sense for casual gaming coz as I mentioned in resolution > higher resolution will give you less performance anyway. I would use this only if you are making videos and want have them higher resolution than your screen have as Digital Dream did when he was trying upscale his 8K screen to 16K to test our 2022 performance edits which at start of 2022 was extremely problematic even in 4K and now he was able to do some calm gameplay in crazy 16K.

NVIDIA CONTROL PANEL SETTINGS:

For these settings, for best performance results, I would simply recommend you to follow this great video, that I link at end of this section. Most important additional info is if you have option to select Preferred graphics processor, to set game use High-performance NVIDIA processor otherwise your pc performance would be like having 5+years older pc than you really have.

Same apply on option ‘Power management mode’ which you for sure want to have set to Prefer maximum performance.
One more addition is don’t listen his performance tip for Anisotropic filtering because that would cause yellow roads in distance in GTA which you for sure don’t want. That means keep this one at 16x.

You may not have so much options as he has in his video, mostly if you have latop and not desktop pc, but that is ok as most important part is section Manage 3D setting.

Even more performance:

For even more performance settings of your PC don’t forgot to check pinned messages of Support_chat on our Discord where you can find old message from 2021 called CRASH/TEXTURE LOSS FIXES RECAP. Even that you should not anymore experience texture loss nor crashes if everything is installed correctly as we guide, these tips are mostly performance tips and it’s worth to check and follow most of them.

EXTRA:

One more extra tip for ultimate best settings is using Resource adjuster by zombieguy which is taking care of biggest problem of this game which is the fact it’s 10years old game which was not build for such capable hardware as latest hardware we have today and game originally is not really capable to use full power of new hardware. This will change these limitations and allow game use more of your power to get you ultra performance for hours and hours or even days of uninterrupted gameplay. If you are not experienced and you dont understand this file, I don’t recommend you touch and experiment with its .ini file and leave it as it is set on default. Click here to download.

This script have just one issue. Rockstar set automatic check of memory usage of this game and if it’s using memory that was considered dangerously high 10years ago, it can force game to stop which would be basically crash of the game without any message during any gameplay moment. But with great modding community there is solution for it as well thanks to Zolika and his ZolikaPatch which you can download here.

But this script have multiple functions so it is important to make sure you have turned on removing of this automatic checker which you can do by opening ZPatchV.ini and making sure that ‘RemoveAntiDebugCheck’ is set to 1.
For better game experience you can set as well ‘RandomCarColorOrder’ to 1 and everything else you should set to 0 for best performance as many of these features are nice, but as he state there, will lower your performance.

That is probably everything I can tell you for your questions about extra performance and graphics settings. Of course don’t forgot on basic computer care like cleaning your cache, cleaning broken registries and other cleaning like that with whatever program you prefer no matter if its CCleaner, Advanced System Care or any other program. Enjoy playing (: