Rockstar’s latest addition to its car-stealing open-world franchise, Grand Theft Auto V, may have been on the market for a few years, but it’s still a gold standard for optimization and graphical fidelity. As these 4K GTA V screenshots demonstrate, there’s still a good reason for that. Though some spots may be starting to show their age, there’s plenty to appreciate, especially with the resolution cranked up to a full 3,840 x 2,160. Click the photos in the gallery above to see them in full detail.
A big part of that immersion is Rockstar’s attention to detail. Despite a massive world with lots to see, the game’s designers and artists somehow found the time to flesh out every building, park, and intersection with the sort of oddities and under-the-radar additions that make the city of Los Santos feel as real as Los Angeles.
As our PC performance guide also pointed out, that level of detail doesn’t stop when you leave the city. The foliage and grass detail is the single largest contributor to poor performance, and turning it up to Ultra can render even the most powerful PC into a smoldering pile of parts.
So of course, we downloaded this perennial favorite to our test rig and cranked the settings up at full 4K. Our test rig is powered by an Intel Core i7-6950X with 16GB of RAM, and a Zotac GTX 1080 Ti AMP! edition with 11GB of video memory. Even our system wasn’t capable of producing consistently high frame rates at these settings, but it did give us chance to nab some beautiful screenshots of our 4K flyover.
Ok, we admit, we used a cheat code to score these sweet screenshots. The code BARNSTORM, which you can input by pressing the ~ key on PC, will spawn in a fixed wing stunt plane that makes these flyovers easy, even if you aren’t a particularly skilled pilot who keeps crashing into buildings.
We also made use of Rockstar’s built-in cinematic camera by pressing “R” while flying. While this wasn’t particularly conducive to our flying skills, it does rotate through a nice selection of more dramatic camera angles than you could achieve simply by rotating or zooming out the standard camera orientation.