Best GTA V PC Settings for Graphics and Performance

GTA V scales from a decade-old laptop to a ray-traced showcase, but the menus bury a few frame-killers. Here is what to change, what to leave alone, and how the March 2025 Enhanced edition shifts the math.

How the settings menus are laid out

GTA V splits its options across two tabs, and both matter. The Graphics tab holds the everyday sliders: Resolution, FXAA, MSAA, Texture Quality, Shader Quality, Shadow Quality, Reflection Quality, Reflection MSAA, Water Quality, Grass Quality, Post FX, Anisotropic Filtering, Ambient Occlusion and Tessellation. The Advanced Graphics tab is where the expensive extras live: Extended Distance Scaling, Extended Shadows Distance, Long Shadows, High Resolution Shadows and High Detail Streaming While Flying.

The Enhanced edition (released March 4, 2025) keeps that structure but adds a ray tracing group and a Frame Scaling section for upscaling. If you are on the older Legacy build, you get the same two tabs minus ray tracing and upscaling. Watch the little VRAM and estimated-memory bar at the bottom of the Graphics tab as you change settings; pushing past your card's memory is what causes texture stutter, no matter how high your average frame rate looks.

The settings that cost the most FPS

Anti-aliasing is the first place to claw back frames. FXAA is nearly free and smooths jagged edges, so leave it on. MSAA is a different animal: at 2x, 4x or 8x it carries a heavy penalty for a modest sharpness gain, and turning it off is the biggest single win on most systems. Right below it, Reflection MSAA applies the same expensive smoothing to reflections only, and the visual change is so slight that almost nobody notices it off, so disable it and reclaim a few frames for free.

Grass Quality recovers more frames than any other quality slider when you step it down. Ultra grass is gorgeous in the countryside but punishing; dropping to High or Normal is the cleanest way to lift a struggling frame rate, and in the city you will barely see the difference. In the Advanced Graphics tab, Extended Distance Scaling is the true frame-eater: it streams in distant objects and is largely CPU-limited, so it can bottleneck even a strong GPU. Capping it well below maximum (many players settle around 50 to 60 percent) keeps pop-in reasonable while restoring a lot of performance. Extended Shadows Distance, by contrast, costs very little, so it is safe to leave on if you have headroom.

Everything else is comparatively cheap. Texture Quality should stay as high as your VRAM allows, since it barely touches frame rate but greatly affects how the game looks and, if set too high, triggers streaming hitches. Ambient Occlusion, Tessellation, Water Quality and Shader Quality can sit at High for a strong image without much cost; drop them only if you are still short of your target.

Ray tracing in the Enhanced edition

The Enhanced edition's headline feature is hardware ray tracing, exposed as separate toggles for Ray Traced Shadows, Reflections, Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion, plus a Scene BVH Quality setting that controls accuracy. They do not cost the same. Ray Traced Global Illumination is by far the most demanding, giving back roughly a quarter of your frame rate when switched off; Ray Traced Reflections is the next heaviest. Ray Traced Shadows and Ambient Occlusion are comparatively light.

The practical approach is to treat ray tracing as the last thing you enable, not the first. Get a stable 60 with rasterized settings, then add RT features one at a time and stop when the frame rate dips below your target. If you have the GPU for it, a mix of Very High ray-traced shadows and reflections with GI left off often looks close to the full effect while running far better. Enhanced ray tracing at 1080p realistically wants an RTX 3060 or RX 6700 XT class card or better, and it pairs best with upscaling turned on.

Upscaling, VSync and frame limits

The Enhanced edition supports DLSS on GeForce RTX cards and FSR on everything else, set through Frame Scaling. Quality mode renders at a lower internal resolution and reconstructs the image, buying a large chunk of performance with little visible softening, which is exactly what makes ray tracing affordable. Frame Generation is also available, but it only works in Windowed Borderless mode with Hardware-Accelerated GPU Scheduling enabled in Windows, not in exclusive fullscreen, so switch your display mode before hunting for the toggle.

For VSync, most players are better off leaving it off to avoid its input lag and instead controlling tearing another way. If you have a G-Sync or FreeSync display, use that. If you want a hard ceiling, the in-game Frame Limit or an external cap keeps the GPU cooler and frame times steady; capping a few frames under your refresh rate, especially with NVIDIA Reflex on where available, gives the smoothest feel. Avoid maxing everything just because you can: a locked 60 with FXAA, no MSAA and tuned distance scaling feels far better than a stuttering 45 with every slider pinned.

A balanced 60 fps setup, step by step

1. Set Resolution to your monitor's native value and display mode to Windowed Borderless if you plan to use upscaling or frame generation.
2. Turn FXAA on and MSAA off, then turn Reflection MSAA off as well.
3. Set Texture Quality as high as your VRAM bar allows without going into the red.
4. Put Grass Quality at High (or Normal on weaker GPUs) and leave Shaders, Water and Ambient Occlusion around High.
5. Open Advanced Graphics and pull Extended Distance Scaling down to roughly 50 to 60 percent; leave Extended Shadows Distance on.
6. On Enhanced, enable DLSS or FSR at Quality, then add ray-traced shadows and reflections, testing frame rate before touching Global Illumination.
7. Set VSync off, cap your frame rate just under your refresh rate, and drive to a busy area to confirm the setup holds 60.