How to Benchmark GTA V Enhanced

The recent update to GTA V on PC, called GTA V Enhanced, has many downloading the 12-plus-year-old game once again to see how amazing it looks with its ray-traced, globally illuminated glory. If you’ve got the hardware to make it shine, why not take another trip to Los Santos and revisit what made this such a great game in the first place? It still holds up, and the new settings enhance it significantly—especially when it’s raining at night and neon signs reflect off puddled pavements.

Start tweaking the many graphical settings, and you’ll likely want to check your frame rate with everything maxed out. Once you see how it performs, you can adjust settings to keep your escapades with Franklin, Michael, and Trevor from turning into a stuttering mess. However, if you go looking for the benchmark option on the main settings screen when you first launch GTA V Enhanced, you won’t find it.

That’s because the benchmark option only appears when playing in story mode—and even then, it isn’t always visible, depending on whether you’re in a mission. If the option isn’t there, keep playing until you’ve completed the current part of the story, and it should reappear. Alternatively, launching the game fresh and heading straight into story mode should also make it available.

Running the benchmark is straightforward: configure your settings, apply them, and then hit Tab or click the button in the bottom-right corner of the screen to start the test. There are five test sections, but the last one is the most relevant to actual gameplay. It begins with a jet flying under a bridge before heading downtown, where the usual chaotic GTA action unfolds—ending with a lorry explosion.

The benchmark has been part of GTA V since its original PC release, and while it now benefits from enhanced visuals, the process remains the same. However, one key difference is that the results screen no longer summarizes your hardware’s performance. Instead, you’ll need to check your Documents\Rockstar Games\GTAV Enhanced\Benchmarks folder, where you’ll find text output files with your minimum and average frame rates for each section.

As a quick aside, if you’re wondering what settings to tweak, we’d recommend starting with “Very High RT” if you have a modern graphics card, you know, something like the RTX 50 Series or AMD's RX 9070 XT. This improves visuals without tanking performance too much. From there, you can fine-tune individual settings as needed.