The Best Gaming Laptops To Play GTA Online Without A Hitch

Grand Theft Auto V and its online component continue to be one of the most-played titles in 2024 with hundreds of thousands of players playing across multiple platforms, including PC, every month due to a constant stream of content from Rockstar North. Despite this, GTA Online, an extension of the GTA V universe, comes with surprisingly modest hardware requirements for a modern title.

This is easily explained: GTA V was released on PC in April 2015, nearly one and a half years after its console release in September 2013, and scales well with hardware upgrades, but is designed to work with gaming PCs from nearly a decade ago at the time of release. It does support higher graphics presets, resolutions, and refresh rates, making it often worth splurging a bit more on a better gaming PC or laptop to benefit from them.

GTA Online: Hardware Requirements Explained

GTA V’s Official Hardware Requirements

GTA V’s FiveM Roleplaying PC Hardware Requirements

Much of GTA V’s (and GTA Online’s) requirements feature older hardware, but there are key takeaways here, especially when one considers the slightly different requirements in tow for its FiveM multiplayer and roleplaying servers, for players looking to go that route.

GTA V currently requires a minimum of Windows 10 64-bit and recommends 8GB of RAM, while RP servers that can be a bit more demanding double this to 16GB while recommending Windows 11 as the de facto OS to limit issues. The roleplaying mod requires the 120GB the base game currently needs, plus an additional 4-8 GB of cache to run unhindered, making it safe to presume an approximate space requirement of 150GB to account for future patches.

GTA V should run quite well on most current-gen quad-core CPUs or higher given the higher IPC counts and clock speeds in play currently, even as its GPU requirements are modest at best versus most modern titles. Most gaming PCs that can run current-gen esports titles should be able to run GTA V with relative ease.

It should also be noted that while GTA V can easily be played at high refresh rates on modern hardware, the underlying RAGE engine that powers it has a maximum FPS cap of 188 in play, making for diminishing returns on screens that offer a refresh rate slightly higher than 165Hz. This means a higher resolution display is a better investment for GTA V.

Playing GTA Online Or GTA RP On A Gaming Laptop

While modern gaming laptops are considerably more powerful than their predecessors, they still lag behind gaming PCs due to thermal and power restrictions in play. Thankfully, a title like GTA V is not particularly demanding currently and, while users might have to push a bit higher to get a better online, most gaming laptops should be able to run a title like GTA V with no problems. Even those with mid-range hardware should be able to get north of 60 FPS at FHD or higher resolutions with ease.

The team at Game Rant takes second-guessing a laptop out of the equation by offering a tiered list of some of the best gaming laptops available currently to users looking to game casually or competitively without having performance issues.

The Best Gaming Laptops To Play GTA Online In 2024

The ASUS TUF Gaming A16 is a powerful, well-rounded gaming laptop that offers both, a current-gen CPU and GPU, opting for the fast, but power-efficient 16-core, 32-thread AMD Ryzen 9 7940HX and a powerful Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU with 8GB of VRAM in tow.

It comes with a large 90WHr battery, an impressive QHD+ display that offers a 165Hz refresh rate, and more than enough RAM and SSD storage space for both GTA Online and custom roleplaying servers. The TUF A16 also conforms to military-grade MIL-STD-810H toughness standards, offering excellent thermals in tow, thanks to an overhauled cooling system in play.

The TUF Gaming A16 does this all while weighing in at just 5 lbs, making it a relatively lightweight offering when one considers the amount of hardware it has tucked in at a price tag that is slightly more expensive than the competition, but does allow for ASUS to offer better cooling, an excellent screen and a better design for the added cost, even as the A16 exceeds GTA V and its online component’s needs easily at the time of writing.

Users wanting one of the most premium, performance-centric gaming laptops in the business that also looks and feels the part, can turn to the 2024 refresh of the Razer Blade 18. This laptop houses both an Intel Core i9 14900HX CPU and a powerful RTX 4090 GPU. Razer also throws a generous 2TB of SSD storage and 32GB of DDR5 RAM in what is already an impressive amalgamation of PC hardware.

The Blade 18’s distinguishing hardware offering, however, is the QHD+ 300Hz MiniLED display that is brighter and sharper than most screens users will play GTA Online on. It must be remembered, however, that GTA’s game engine, RAGE, technically caps out at 188 FPS, which would prevent users from taking full advantage of a display that should hold its own against the competition with relative ease otherwise.

On the plus side, thanks to the 14th generation Core i9 CPU, Intel is offering a free copy of Star Wars Outlaws with the laptop as part of an ongoing promotion at the time of writing. While it won’t make much of a dent in the $4500 asking price that the Razer Blade 18 currently commands, given the hardware is considerably overkill when it comes to the needs of a title like GTA V, this laptop can run the title spectacularly well, while allowing users to benefit from the underlying performance in other current and upcoming titles this year.

Users looking for a balanced, yet popular gaming laptop to play GTA Online can turn to the GIGABYTE G5 KF Gaming Laptop, which clocks in at just under $1000 at the time of writing. For the price, Gigabyte offers a 15.6-inch 144Hz FHD display, a 13th generation Intel Core i7 13620H CPU, and an RTX 4060 GPU with plenty of SSD space, plus 16GB of RAM on offer.

This makes the G5 KF a balanced, yet well-priced option in a market where laptops with similar specs can often cost an additional $200-400 more, while packing essentially the same hardware. It is important to note that the G5 KF does come with a power-limited RTX 4060 flavor, offering only 75W of TGP for gamers, even as it cuts corners on the battery, limiting it to 54WHr in a market where most of its competition pulls ahead considerably.

One could argue, however, that it allows the Gigabyte laptop to offer a more lightweight option versus many heavier alternatives, even as it sneaks in a full keyboard as part of its offerings, making it a balanced and sufficiently powered option to play GTA Online for the foreseeable future.

While the 2024 refresh of ASUS’s Zephyrus G14 gaming laptop offers plenty of upgrades under the hood, it also removes the user’s ability to upgrade its RAM, unlike its 2023 model. This does not, however, make it any less capable a gaming laptop. It can hold its own while offering an impressive form factor, weighing in at only 1.5kg and housing an impressive 3K OLED display with a refresh rate of 120Hz.

The G14 also offers an AI-capable 8-core, 16-thread AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS CPU, and a mid-range RTX 4060 GPU with 8GB of VRAM, plus 90W of TGP, while throwing in a decent 73WHr battery. This, along with its large SSD and decent RAM offering, makes it an exceptionally well-rounded gaming laptop to get for gaming in general, even as it excels at GTA Online, an experience the laptop can max out relatively easily.

Users looking for a fast, capable gaming laptop that trades at a lower price tag while offering the ability to play most modern games, including GTA V and GTA Online, should consider the Acer Nitro V lineup, which has plenty of models that offer a balance of power and pricing. The Acer Nitro V above uses an Intel Core i5 13420H CPU in a 4+4 core configuration, offering 4 performance cores to match, and considerably exceeding GTA’s needs.

An RTX 4050 handles graphics on a gaming laptop that offers an excellent FHD IPS display, while the laptop comes with 8GB of DDR5 RAM and 512GB of NVMe SSD storage in tow. While this exceeds the requirements for GTA V and Online, one could argue that having extra RAM in play can help, especially when roleplaying servers recommend up to 16GB currently.

The Nitro V is a capable gaming laptop for your GTA needs. However, one would be well-advised to pick up another stick of 8GB DDR5 RAM to avoid having performance issues in certain situations.

The ASUS ROG Scar 17 X3D is undoubtedly one of the fastest gaming laptops in the business, marrying AMD’s 16-core Zen 4 CPU with a large stacked L3 cache, which saw Team Red’s CPUs pull so far ahead in recent times. This is backed by Nvidia’s fastest GPU on offer for laptops currently, the RTX 4090 mobile, which powers a bright and capable QHD display that has an impressive 240Hz refresh rate.

The Scar 17 X3D not only offers one of the best CPUs for gaming on a laptop, but also throws in plenty of SSD space and RAM on top of a liquid metal-based cooler under the hood, making it one of the fastest gaming laptops in the business. All of this does come at a cost, and the laptop pushes past $3500, even in its current discounted state.

ASUS’s offering is, mildly put, so far overkill that it could potentially play the upcoming GTA VI title relatively easily. This makes it the best performance-grade recommendation for playing GTA Online currently, and possibly future iterations of the same.

FAQ

Q: How Much RAM Does GTA Online Require?

GTA Online Recommends 8GB of RAM currently. 3rd party mods and roleplaying servers recommend 16GB of RAM to account for their added performance and memory overheads.

Q: How much space does GTA V currently need?

GTA V currently requires north of 120GB of install space. This does not include any 3rd party mods which require additional space. The team at Game Rant recommends an SSD to play without long wait times.