Asus STRIX Gaming GTX 950 2GB DC2 OC Review

Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.

Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series.

The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia).

We set all of GTA V's primary settings to the Very High level (ambient occlusion was High). MSAA was turned off as it deals a harsh blow to the graphics cards' frame rates. We saw the game use over 3GB of VRAM on a 4GB graphics card, however squeezing the files into a 2GB frame buffer did not incur a noticeable performance penalty. The built-in benchmark is used to gather performance data.

The magical 60 FPS mark is surpassed in GTA V using the GTX 950. Being able to push the game at Very High image quality settings and a 1920×1080 resolution is solid performance in itself. GTA V scales well with hardware performance, although it can be a difficult game to run when settings start getting turned up.

Our overclocked Radeon 7850 solution is around 18% slower than Asus' factory-overclocked GTX 950, and that forces the AMD card's performance below an average of 60 FPS. Manually overclocking the Asus STRIX GTX 950 yields a 10% improvement in the average frame rate, while also bumping the minimums up above 30 FPS.

While extra VRAM would have quickly been utilised by GTA V's engine, the GTX 950's 2GB frame buffer was able to cope without noticeable stutter or drop-outs. The only 4GB card in today's comparison – Sapphire's 4GB R9 380 Nitro – shows the benefit that a larger serving of VRAM can potentially have on GTA V's minimum frame rates.

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