The AMD Radeon VII Review: An Unexpected Shot At The High-End

Grand Theft Auto V (DX11)

Now a truly venerable title, GTA V is a veteran of past game suites that is still graphically demanding as they come. As an older DX11 title, it provides a glimpse into the graphically intensive games of yesteryear that don't incorporate the latest features. Originally released for consoles in 2013, the PC port came with a slew of graphical enhancements and options. Just as importantly, GTA V includes a rather intensive and informative built-in benchmark, somewhat uncommon in open-world games.

The settings are identical to its previous appearances, which are custom as GTA V does not have presets. To recap, a "Very High" quality is used, where all primary graphics settings turned up to their highest setting, except grass, which is at its own very high setting. Meanwhile 4x MSAA is enabled for direct views and reflections. This setting also involves turning on some of the advanced rendering features - the game's long shadows, high resolution shadows, and high definition flight streaming - but not increasing the view distance any further.

We've updated some of the benchmark automation and data processing steps, so results may vary at the 1080p mark compared to previous data.

GTA V is another game where the Radeon VII starts off on the back foot. Its 38% 4K performance improvement over the RX Vega 64 is outstanding and nothing to be scoffed at, but even this jump isn't enough to draw even with the GTX 1080 Ti FE and RTX 2080. Ultimately, it lands somewhere in between the reference RTX 2070 and RTX 2080.