Performance Issues?

I have a fairly competent build (GTX 760, 8Gb RAM, Win 8.1, ect.) but for some reason my general performance has been dragging. It was running fine the first few days I had the game, but then out of nowhere I noticed the draw distance got really bad, and before I knew it, the frame rate dropped to 23. I tried lowering a few graphical settings if only to get the frame rate up, but it has yet to recover. Up until today it was at least playable, but now it drags so much the game itself can barely function. Any suggestions? I'm hoping the answer isn't any sort of re-install, if only because of how massive the game is. If it does require a re-install though, in order to back-up my save should I just take the "Profiles" folder? Thanks, and I would appreciate it a lot if someone could help me out with this, as my issue got buried beneath Reddit.

Did you try the Nvidia GTA V drivers? Apparently that really boosts the performance quite a bit.

yes actually, I installed that before I ever booted up the game. It ran near-perfectly initially, but now it's not even playable.

Your display didn't change to 24hz in settings for some reason, did it? I've noticed a number of times that GTA will revert back to 1080p/24hz seemingly on it's own and I have to change it back to 60hz.

@mb: I know what you're talking about, but I don't think that's the issue. Changing the hertz was one of the first things I tried, but alas it did nothing.

The game won't let me change the refresh rate, even though I'm using a 60 hz monitor (it sticks to 59hz).

It's nothing to worry about, your display is probably reporting 59.97 or 59.94. I encounter this in some games, including GTA V, if I'm using my TV as a display over HDMI instead of a proper monitor.

Yup, my rig is not able to run it at Ultra at any playable framerate even only at 1080p, super frustrating.

There's a few things you can try. Without knowing what your settings are, here are some general things I did to get the game running 60fps at 1080p:

• Reinstalling actually works. I was getting some weird DirectX errors and crashes to desktop, the game launcher will actually recommend you reinstall. I did and I haven't seen those errors again. There's an easy way to reinstall without downloading 60GB worth of files again!
• If you want to install the game without re-downloading all the files you have to "Backup" GTA V to a hard drive where you have 60GB of space. Its not a matter of just copy pasting the files, you have to do the backup inside of Steam. You tell steam where to backup the files, then "delete local files" from your library, then run a "Restore" and Steam uses the backup to reinstall the game wherever you want. In the client it's under the "Steam" menu, then click "Backup/Restore Games..."
• I noticed that the graphics revert to 1080p 30 when i use windowed borderless, but goes full 60hz in fullscreen.
• Try setting shadow quality to "Normal" and Soft Shadows to "Softer." I gained the most fps just lowering the shadow settings!
• Put Distance Scaling, Population Density and Pop Variety all at 50%.
• Try taking texture quality down a step from what you're at now, but keep everything else high or very high, tesselation on, grass quality very high, etc. I ended up at a Texture quality of "High." Very High looks pretty, but brings me down to 30-40fps instead of 60-70.
• Turn your AA completely off, then increment it up and watch the fps drops. FXAA will be the lowest cost, 2x MSAA is next highest I use, the highest I use is 2xMSAA+TXAA.
• This might sound dumb if you know how anti-aliasing works, but some people enable both of these settings. If you have MSAA enabled, turn off FXAA. Same goes the other way. There's no reason to use both of these settings over top of each other.