Well... Playing on an i5 2500k and an old HD 6870 with 1GB VRAM (@1080p) and... WOW! I'm running a weird combination of low to high settings (distance scaling, population density and population variety maxed out, textures, shaders, etc on normal (=lowest) + fxaa, softest shadows, and a bit of tesselation and ambient occlusion) and I'm getting an average of 45 fps. Sometimes it jumps above 60 (in narrow alleys), sometimes it drops to 32, 33 (driving across huge intersections with lots of stuff going on). Runs very smooth for such an old card. There were only two occasions where the framerate dropped to 3 or 4 frames per second while driving outside of the city, which was a bit odd, since two of the three factors that go beyond my VRAM (population density + variety) aren't even present there... DRM wasn't an issue so far. No problems with Social Club on release day, which I found very surprising.

The game itself is quite enjoyable. I like that you play different characters and how their stories get together (improves the "movie feel" that I always loved since Vice City) and how you get a good and "natural" mix of story missions, exploration and random stuff. I'm not too far into the game yet, but I already had more fun than in GTA IV. Lamar is exactly the kind of "facepalm character" I want to see in GTA games! And then there are completely random and funny side missions like Michael smoking the homegrown weed of this "Don't say nope to dope" guy^^ Great!

Driving feels a bit different in this game. Can't say if it is better or worse now. First person view? Sucks for driving (can't drive precise when I can't look into a right hand corner - don't like looking around with the right stick) and... On foot? Well... Tried it, didn't like it, will try it again later. It feels too much like a first person shooter. I hope it'll stay an optional perspective for future GTA games.

This isn't the thing where it doesn't like you having non-alpha numeric (or accented) characters in your Windows username that I've been hearing about? No?

I believe the work-around for now is to create a new Windows profile with admin rights and none of those chars in the name...

The thing about cockpit driving is that atm it feels like he's putting his face on the steering wheel while driving. It's zoomed too far in and you need an FOV slider to zoom it out a bit.

I'm still holding my wallet - I'm not sure if I can get it working smoothly.

I wonder if you could say what level of details I would get on my specs:

i7-3630QM
GeForce GT 650M 2 GB
8 GB RAM (SO-DIMM DDR3, 1600 MHz)

I would be grateful for your advice guys :-)

Here is Totalbiscuit's Port Report:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEYJS799dI

And so far Rockstar HAS learned from their mistakes of GTA 4 in terms of PC version. This is a much better PC version than GTA 4 was.

Nah... The main thing about cockpit perspective is that I don't like it. That's not a GTA specific problem, but a problem that I have with racing games too. They put the steering wheel at the centre of the screen (which is correct for "first person"), show you useless stuff on the left side of the screen (which I barely look at when driving in real life) and the rear view mirror on the right third of the screen. You can't see your car's right without using the analog stick to look around.

In real life, I use the "full windscreen" to see where I have to place my car. I'm perfectly aware of my right side with just a short and "subconscious" (indirect) look from the corner of my eye. I don't have to divert my eyes from traffic and I surely don't have to turn my head around in a gross motoric and very slow manner. And when I turn into a right hand corner, I focus on things that are happening on the right side - the side that I don't see in video game's cockpit perspective (without strange analog stick movement).

I just found it noteworthy because GTA is not a racing game. You're not on a short track (well known and never changing) with curbs and feedback in form of a vibrating controller. In GTA there are lots of other cars and obstacles, so it's even more important to know what's happening on both sides. Thus cockpit view makes me feel uncomfortable at higher speeds.

Yeah, learned so much they forgot about languages other than English, so anyone who has non-English characters in his account name in Windows is deep in fried shit. Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz is disappoint. Last time we had that... I don't even remember when. Wasteland 2 disallowed custom portraits, true, but you could play game.
They learned their mistakes and took so much time porting and polishing their game, people with two R9 290X or GTX 980 can't get stable FPS.
Game is so polished there are still people who can't even launch the damn thing.
I haven't tried to launch it at my home PC, but at my workstation (that is approximately "almost constant 60 FPS" Witcher 3 on Ultra ready) while Steam's FPS meter shows flat 50-70FPS, in reality it is so laggy and choppy, it's barely playable in first mission (prologue was gorgeous and seamless, though, first person view is outstanding).
Lessons learned? Unlikely. Yet stability is the sign of excellence, as Rockstar oops they did it again.

Man you would not believe how much the GTA V forums in Steam is FULL of Russian users:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/271590/discussions/#

Just keep scrolling lots of threads in Russian.

I take it this series is popular in russia?

How could I know? Rockstar does not reports me. Yet according to SteamSpy, second population in game is from China. Russia is only fourth, after UK, and, of course, US. Seen a lot of hieroglyphs topics back in the days, when GTA V only appeared on Steam, could be true.

Just on a side note: GTA 5 shows how broken game rating is nowadays, where everything below 80 is considered "bad". The game currently has a metascore of 99/100!!! I mean, yes, okay, this game is definitely a 90+ game, but... 99/100??? Seriously? GTA 5 is THE perfect game, without any flaws and without any potential to improve? Yeah, sure...

But that's what you get when every publisher wants his games to be 85%+ titles... To differentiate a game "never seen before" from other good games, you have to give it a ridiculous rating such as 99% -.-

Don't loose hope, friend, hang in there, medicinal science works wonders nowadays! Don't stress yourself over it, it is a non-terminal disease, rejoice!

TB is impressed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEYJS799dI

TB says at the end that integrated graphics card will crash the launcher making the game unable to run. So you'll need to disable it and run primarily on your dedicated graphics card. You have that problem Bansama?

Nope. My PC username is the same as here. One word, all normal standard letters. It's also not the graphic card problem. Nor is it WindowBlinds. It's not my anti-virus. It's not DEP. Basically, if a work around has been suggested, I've already tried it with no luck. Just an annoying BEX64 error =(