The hardware we were talking about happens to actually be 'a lot more powerful' than the recommended specs. While I can't be sure it'll run the game at 60 fps maxed out I think it's a safe bet to say that our hardware will run it at the high end of the spectrum at at least 1080p/60. I have my doubts that anyone is going to go out, buy a $500 GPU, and have this particular game - which was originally designed around the constraints of the 360 and PS3 - push it all the way down to 30-40fps, even maxed out. I mean, seriously? How many games besides Unity and Crysis 3 actually tax GPUs to that level? It's unreasonable to expect this game to do that unless it's a bad port of legendary proportions like GTA IV was - and at this point I doubt that's the case.
You can never make assumptions on how something is going to run based on recommended specs just because your hardware is a lot better. Not when talking about "maxing" something and expecting 60FPS, especially when talking about open world games.
Maxing something out means bumping all settings to max with no exceptions, if that includes SSAA then you most likely won't be getting any 60FPS. A lot of people have no idea what SSAA might be, so they don't know that they might actually be rendering the game at 4K because they set SSAA to x4.
Just look at all the complaints about shitty performance in Dying Light. People put everything at max, expected it to run great and then complained that their 980 was struggling even though they had set the draw distance to max (where the lowest draw distance was still better than PS4).
The term "maxing" should also go away. Many people have been spoiled by being able to run all those last gen ports at max settings between 2010-2014 when PC gaming really started to take off again, because the GPUs where just so far ahead of the consoles by then. And even though GTAV was built around last gen, the substantially updated current gen version only ran at 1080p30 and from what we have seen, the PC version will be even better in a lot of ways. The recommended GPU is not that much more powerful than a PS4.
We have no idea how far we will be able to push the draw distance or how taxing that will be. We have no idea how much we can increase the traffic density. I expect (and hope) we will get the same kind of settings they had in IV (
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m320/emzeesquared/gtaspecs.jpg ) and I certainly don't think I would be able to run GTAV at 60FPS with my overclocked 970 and i7 4770K if I max out those bars to 100% or close to it. If I will be able to do that, then yay for me. But until we have benchmarks, there's absolutely no way of telling how it will run for anyone and it's pointless to make people think they should be able to max something out before release.
I have no doubts that I will be able to run it at fairly high settings and maintain 60FPS with my PC (although I will lower stuff because I have a 144Hz monitor and prefer higher framerates), but I never take for granted that I will be able to max any game out no matter what recommended specs it has.
It's almost 7 am now and I've been up all night, so sorry if there's any mistakes or whatever.